The National Demolition Association’s Demolition Academy – an intensive safety and management training event – will take place this year for the first time at the OSHA Training Institute in Arlington Heights, Illinois from 14 to 16 October.

The Demolition Academy begins on October 14 with the Demolition-Specific OSHA 10-Hour Certification, offered in both English and Spanish. For those already holding their certification, there is in-depth training in fall protection, accident investigation, confined space, and aerial lift training.

Read the full details here.

City leaders in Wheeling, West Virginia plan to use their home rule powers to recover $209,290 from 17 property owners for demolishing structures that were deemed dilapidated.

“For the first time, the city will be able to use its home rule powers to collect liens,” Councilman James Tiu said regarding the plan that will allow Wheeling to force the sale of neglected property. The program will assist the city’s efforts to reclaim money spent on demolitions, asbestos abatements and related activities associated with the properties.

Read the full story here.

Campbell Associates has become the latest company to join our fast-growing Business Directory. The acoustics specialist company behind the CadnaA sound prediction and monitoring software has enjoyed an extremely high profile recently with appearances on teh Institute of Demolition Engineers’ Roadshow, in the pages of Demolition & Dismantling, and here on Demolition News.

To celebrate joining the Business Directory, the company has extended the special offer on its CadnaA system. Demolition News readers will continue to qualify for a 30% discount on the system, as detailed here.

With demolition work in preparation for the London 2012 Games still taking place just a few miles from my front door, it’s easy to forget that the forward-planning of these vast, global events never stops. And so on 2 October, Chicago, along with a whole host of rival cities, will wait to learn if they have been selected to host the 2016 Games.

But even though Chicago doesn’t yet know the outcome, demolition works that would be associated with a successful bid have already caused health concerns for the city’s residents, according to Chicago Talks.

Residents believe that some preparatory works have already created a degree of airborne dust which is causing breathing problems among asthmatics. “I already feel the effects. There’s clearly dust if nothing else,” says local resident Terry Clark. “I’m very upset and distressed. If I’m feeling like this now and they haven’t even started.”

Click here for the full story.

Several fire crews were last night working to contain a fire caused when routine welding or hot cutting works at a demolition company’s headquarters resulted in an explosion that left one worker severely burned.

Initial reports suggest that the worker set off a series of explosions that nearly destroyed the company. The man had to be airlifted to the hospital shortly after 11:00 a.m. when the explosions tore through the Robles Demolition company.

Read further details and see a video of the resulting fire here.

We are beginning to suspect that someone has circulated a memo to US demolition contractors that advises them to abandon all common sense and business acumen during the current recession, and merely submit bid prices that verge on lunacy.

What other explanation can there be when a contract to demolish a wastewater plant (and is it only me that’s intrigued by the fact that the spokesman is a Mr J. Christ?) in Palm City, Florida with an estimated value of $200,000 has been won with a bid of just $60,000.

It’s true that President Obama’s much-vaunted stimulus package has yet to bear fruit among the demolition fraternity.   Buch such suicidal pricing is surely the worst kind of short-termism.   And it is likely that the low prices set to win much-needed work today will be expected by clients long after the cloud of recession has lifted.

Mike Taylor

Taylor said the marketability of C&D material is highly dependent upon location, other competitive materials, and demand. Therefore, there are currently only three materials that are regularly recycled.
Most of the metal from a demolished structure currently goes to the scrap metal industry. “That’s pretty much all of the metal from the smallest venetian blind up to the biggest I-beam,” Taylor said. “We’re the largest source of feedstock for scrap metal.”

The other two marketable C&D components are wood and concrete. Taylor said both are very region sensitive. “If you have an area where there are wood burning power plants that’s another potential market for your product,” Taylor said. “The same is true for concrete. In areas of high-aggregate demand, like Los Angeles or San Francisco, the demand for concrete coming out of demolished structures is incredibly high.”

In big stone states, like Pennsylvania or Kansas, concrete is often less competitive in price than virgin material. “With this material, if you have to transport it, with the price of fuel, more than 20 to 25 miles it tends to lose its value pretty quickly,” Taylor said.

Another element impacting the viability of C&D recycling is landfill costs, Taylor said. If the debris is removed from New York, for example, it might cost over $125 a ton to dispose of the material. But Taylor said there are places in central Michigan where it only costs $8 a ton. “That is one of the pressures that exist that has an impact in certain regions of the country on whether material is successfully recycled or not,” Taylor said.

Taylor said some states have established regulations to promote C&D recycling, while others have implemented rules that hinder the industry. He cited California where most of the counties are required to get to a 50 percent recycling rate. But it is often expensive to get a permit for a recycling facility. “That inhibits the possibility of a lot of people entering the market when they look at the overall profit margin,” Taylor said.

Another problem is in Texas. Taylor said the state ruled that recyclers could not operate a C&D facility within a mile of another occupied building. “That’s not a problem if you are demolishing a silo way out in west Texas,” Taylor said. “But unfortunately most of our work is in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. If you want to process the material onsite we’re going to be feet from another building, not a mile.”

Taylor said that to successfully implement a viable C&D recycling system across the country the federal government, through the Environmental Protection Agency, should develop a national C&D recycling policy. He said this would make the process more economically attractive and help develop markets for the recycled commodities.

Taylor cited a mandate by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s that required the federal government to buy recycled paper. The government is one of the largest buyers of paper in the world. “Recycling plants sprung up all over the country,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the federal government should recommend that the state department of transportations and state facility managers allow recycled material to be used. “If the federal government could promote recycling then a decent portion of the material would be used in projects and not sent to a landfill. Recycling would grow,” Taylor said.

Trawling through the vast, unmapped hinterlands of the Internet, we recently came across a New Orleans-based demolition company that goes by the marvelous name of Nutter Buster Demolition (apparently, the company is family-owned and the founder’s surname is Nutter).

We doubt that this can be beaten but we’d love to hear if you think you know, have heard of (or have just created) a better name for a demolition company.

When we first unveiled Demolition News approximately one year ago, we regularly monitored our traffic statistics on Google Analytics; and it often made for pretty depressing reading. Indeed, in our first month in operation, there were six days in which no-one at all visited the site.

How things have changed.

Thanks in part to an influx of new subscribers from the US, possibly attracted by our “why don’t Americans GET high reach demolition” story (our most widely read and commented on this month), the number of visits yesterday hit an all time daily high and have contributed to making August our most successful month to date.

But while we’re delighted to have established a readership “across the pond”, one of the most telling statistics is that more than 10% of all our readers have returned to the site more than 200 times.

Equally pleasing is that the second most visited area of the website, attracting just over a third of ALL visitors,, is our new Business Directory. This has been achieved with just 13 listings, the majority from long-time Demolition News supporters. Just imagine what that could look like if this became a definitive listing of all demolition-related products and services!

So we would just like to take this opportunity to thank all our subscribers, new and regular readers, and of course our sponsors, without whom we simply wouldn’t be here.

In light of the ongoing discussions regarding the inexperience ultra-high demolition excavator utilisation of some US contractors, and the willingness of others to use undersized machines, the outcome of this (quite old) video should become apparent about 21 seconds after it starts, even though it takes almost three minutes to reach its inevitable denouement.