Poignant farewell to former steel-making stronghold.

The most visible vestige of Sparrows Point’s steelmaking past tumbled to the ground yesterday afternoon as workers from CDI imploded the property’s L Blast Furnace.

Workers have been planning for months to bring down the furnace with explosives, part of the ongoing work to demolish structures in advance of redeveloping the property.

Built in 1978, the L Blast Furnace stands 32 stories tall, weighs 11 million pounds and was a key part of the steel-making process at Sparrows Point.

Steel was made at Sparrows Point in southeastern Baltimore County for more than 100 years, mostly under the ownership of Bethlehem Steel. After a series of ownership changes, the mill closed when its then-owner, RG Steel, filed for bankruptcy. About 2,000 people lost their jobs when the mill closed.

Read more here, or view the poignant video below:

Explosives crew standing by to blast river ice.

If a 1-mile-long ice jam on the Platte River doesn’t start moving downstream, officials plan to use explosives to blast it loose early Thursday, said John Winkler, general manager of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District.

“This ice jam has been stubborn. It hasn’t moved one iota,” Winkler said Wednesday morning. The district has contacted Dykon Explosive Demolition Corp. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which would use a helicopter to drop explosives onto the ice jam.

Winkler says his team will decide by Thursday morning whether or not to blast the one and a half mile long ice jam, situated just south of Two Rivers State Park, just south of West Center Road.

“Typically when you’ve got this much open water ahead of it and behind it [the force] just pushes through,” he explained. “But for some reason this is not happening this year.”

Help us trace the scumbags that stole scrap shear.

DemolitionNews readers are asked to be on the lookout for a Rotar RSS 20 scrap shear that was stolen last night from a site in S Wales. The 2.5 tonne shear itself is pretty distinctive, as is the Lehnhoff quick coupler on top of it.

The shear and coupler were stolen from 3663 Foodservices, Langdon Road, Swansea, SA1 8QY.

If you see or are offered either the shear or the quick coupler, please contact Worsley Plant on Tel: 01606 835544 and let’s bring these thieving pond-life to justice.

Compact skid steer adds new dimension to demolition robot concept.

Think of a demolition robot and, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking of something akin to a mini excavator – Track-mounted; boom and dipper configuration at the front end; cab either absent or superfluous.

Well think again.

Those canny Dutch have come up with something with a bit more “zip” about it. The Sherpa is basically a miniature skid steer loader with a hydraulic breaker at the front. But the fact that it is mounted on a wheeled undercarriage rather than the more traditional tracks means that it can move rather more quickly. In addition, its comact dimensions makes it ideally suited to internal demolition applications that require it to pass through a doorway.

Implosion marks the end for Cumbrian power station

An iconic gas-fired power station at Roosecote has been demolished in a controlled explosion.

Energy giant Centrica mothballed the site in 2012 due to the volatile market – it had generated electricity from coal, then gas, for around 60 years.

Ron Hull Demolition carried out the explosive demolition at approximately 4 pm yesterday afternoon.

Energy company will now seek to recoup costs from contractor behind botched implosion.

A Bakersfield man who was badly injured by flying shrapnel during the August 2013 demolition of an old power plant owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has reached a settlement with the utility.

But PG&E has also filed a cross-complaint against the contractor it hired to perform the explosive demolition, which went horribly wrong when chunks of metal were thrown thousands of feet into so-called safe zones following the blast.

In a statement released Monday, PG&E said it “moved quickly to settle” the claim filed by the injured man, Jerry Wood, “because it was the right thing to do.”

“Unfortunately, in this case, the contractor did not fulfill the expectations of the contract to perform the work in a manner that ensured the safety and protection of the public, PG&E employees, and others,” the utility said in the release.

“To that end, PG&E has taken legal action against URS to ensure the contractor lives up to their contractual responsibilities resulting from the incident, including appropriate compensation for Mr. Wood and his family.”

PG&E’s statement did not say how much money Wood is receiving under the settlement.

Read more here.

Why not all progress is good.

OK, I accept that the lack of personal protective equipment might make the modern health and safety police grimace. And I grant you that no modern demolition company would countenance the use of so many men on a single site. And yes, maybe the lack of mechanisation does make this slow and back-breaking work.

But dammit, look at the outfits – This is what demolition would look like if Mumford & Sons had a sudden career crisis and opted for chimney demolition over folk rock music.

Demolition workers with their ass hanging out of their jeans and t-shirts sporting a week’s worth of full English breakfast remnants could learn much from these guys:

Detroit bridge demolition summons maximum breaking power.

When you only have a brief window of opportunity within which to demolish a bridge over a busy roadway, something’s gotta give. And that usually means bringing out the big guns and applying maximum machine power.

That is precisely the approach taken by the demolition crew on this bridge demolition in Detroit recently where four large excavators equipped with hydraulic hammers made light work of the bridge over the I75:

Blast on old bridge reveals the new.

Controlled Demolition Inc. (CDI) has carried out the controlled implosion of the old Schaghticoke (NY) bridge.

Acting as blasting subcontractor to Harrison & Burrowes Bridge Constructors, Inc, CDI successfully dropped the old bridge into the frozen river below to reveal the new, replacement bridge that was also built by Harrison & Burrowes Bridge Constructors, Inc.

End in sight for widely ridiculed Greyfriars bus station.

Work has started to demolish a tower and bridge at a bus station once labelled the “mouth of hell”.

The work, which started at the weekend, is part of the demolition of Northampton’s Greyfriars bus station and office building.

Lady’s Lane, which has been closed while the tower and bridge are removed by crane, will reopen at 18:00 GMT.

The destruction of the 1970s building will be completed in March when it will be flattened using explosives.

The bus station was due to be demolished by the end of 2014, but the discovery of higher-than-anticipated levels of asbestos found in the site pushed the date back.

Costing the equivalent of more than £40m today, the building has been the subject of ridicule for decades as an over-ambitious example of bad planning.

It was derided by Channel 4 presenter and designer Kevin McCloud as “like a great big mouth of hell”.