Incident on Ohio smokestack implosion has implications for entire industry.
The gods of irony and timing were hard at work yesterday weren’t they? Just a few hours after an Australian official had warned that a bridge implosion was “not a public spectacle”, up steps Advanced Explosive Demolition (AED) to fell a seemingly straightforward smokestack in Ohio, only to see it fall in the wrong direction taking overhead power lines with it. The fact that AED’s Explosive Demolition Contractor of the Year award was probably still on its way from Amsterdam to the US merely added salt to an already open wound.
The Australian official is wrong, of course. Just saying that an implosion is not a public spectacle does nothing to remove the public’s endless fascination with things that go bang in the night (or day for that matter).
The AED incident does, however, raise some serious issues, aside from the more obvious “why did the stack fall the wrong way” question.
For one thing, the raw video we uploaded yesterday shows that the blast “involved” several unnamed children. Now we know from experience that Eric and Lisa Kelly are proud of the fact that they work as a travelling family unit; and that’s surely better than children being raised with a single parent while the other darts about the world blowing stuff down. But we remain firmly of the belief that a demolition site is no place for children, regardless of their level of experience or that of their parents.
Furthermore, there is the issue of the negative impact of such incidents on the wider demolition industry. AED operates in a very public way, often allowing TV cameras to follow their every move. Unfortunately, as many troubled celebrities have found to their cost, the media operates on a “live by the sword, die by the sword” basis. And while they’re happy to help you raise your profile, if it makes for good viewing or readership figures, they will not hesitate to cut you down at a moment’s notice.
When we uploaded the raw video of the failed implosion yesterday afternoon (UK time), we found just two references to it on our news stream. This morning, Twitter has in excess of 900 and those for Google and several other news agencies are equally filled with references to “botched explosions” and “near fatal chimney falls”. This certainly isn’t good news for the contractor involved who has an otherwise exemplary safety record; and neither is it good for the industry as a whole which is once again publicly portrayed as, at best, hit and miss.
As an organisation that relies upon footage from these implosions for its very survival, DemolitionNews.com would hate to see the day when every implosion was conducted “behind closed doors” with a one mile exclusion zone and no cameras. But, by the same token, yesterday’s incident was a mere fraction away from being considerably worse, a problem that could have been avoided.
Let us know what you think using the Comments box below.
