Crews working on the Sissiboo River bridge in Nova Scotia were fortunate to avoid serious injury yesterday when a 55-tonne span of the former railway bridge came down faster than expected.

Workers with AW Leil Cranes of Dartmouth were using a 200-tonne crane on a barge operated by the main contractors, RJ McIsaac of Antigonish to lower the steel span about near 5:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 2, 2012.

The span was most of the way down, hanging about 20′ in the air. The barge, with the crane on it, was slowly backing away from the bridge when everything fell apart.

A corner of the span is lying on the end of the barge and the crane’s boom is lying crumpled over the barge and other equipment. The crane’s cab was torn clear off.

Approximately four men, including the crane operator, were believed to be working on the barge at the time of the accident and they all escaped with only some minor injuries.

Read more here.

Regular readers will know that we have followed the progress of the Xcentric Ripper, a hydraulic breaker alternative, ever since our buddies at ECY were awarded the UK agency for the attachment.

Of course, this being the notoriously conservative demolition business, the introduction of anything slightly out of the ordinary was treated with a degree of skepticism.

However, as this video from a London site highlights, the Ripper is more than a match for reinforced concrete and looks very much at home in a demolition environment.

Filmmaker Chris White shot this excellent video of a huge smoke stack coming down in a controlled demolition. The 168 metre (550-foot) high smokestack was built 36 years ago and had to be cleared out for a new power plant.

Check out more demolition videos in the Wired gallery here.

The Gowrie Court tower block was demolished a year ago but, for some reason, this video has taken this long to make its way into the public domain.

If that’s not confusing enough, while the Hitachi 870 high reach machine depicted here carries the Dem-Master branding, we have it on good authority that the work was actually undertaken by Safedem (a fact evidenced by the presence of a few Safedem high vis’ jackets), dispelling once and for all suggestions that the company only does explosive demolition.

Whatever the background, it makes for very good high reach viewing:

Traces of radioactive contamination have been found on the shoes of workers demolishing a former nuclear power station.

It was detected on around a dozen people on Thursday as they prepared to leave a building which they were preparing for demolition.

Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL), which is overseeing the decommissioning of the site in Caithness, has launched an investigation.

In a statement DSRL said: “The area was isolated and follow-up surveys confirmed that the contamination was confined to a small area. An investigation is under way.

Read more here.

The first major event associated with the demolition of the Memorial Bridge is scheduled to take place during the evening hours of Monday, February 6.

Weather permitting and barge setup, the removal and “float out” of the lift span of the nearly 90-year old lift bridge that crosses the Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery, Maine is expected to take place between 8 p.m. and midnight on February 6.

The operation, as high tide approaches at around 10:34 p.m., will involve the use of a barge upon which the estimated two million pound truss lift span will rest after it is disconnected from cables that support it.

The barge will then be floated out of the channel, secured near the New Hampshire shoreline, and then floated down the Piscataqua River early Wednesday morning.

Read more here.

Two rooms of Parkdale Mills Plant 24 in North Carolina were destroyed when a smoldering ember ignited Thursday morning.

The three-alarm fire brought at least 12 fire departments, as well as other emergency crews. The mill housed at least three businesses.

No one was in the building at the time, said Landis Fire Chief Reed Linn. The businesses operate during the day.

The first call came in around 4 a.m. and flames were showing through the roof at the time, Linn said.

Deborah Horne, fire investigator with the Rowan County Fire Marshal’s Office, said one of the embers from a saw blade fell onto some boards near a ventilation duct and smoldered throughout the night, finally igniting as winds blew.

But firefighters were able to contain most of the damage to that area of the building, Horne said.

Read more here.

World explosive demolition contractor of the year Fabio Bruno is currently hard at work placing explosives at the Pavuna bus station in Rio de Janeiro in advance of his latest major blast which is scheduled to take place at 08.00 am local time on Sunday.

The blast – part of the country’s build up to its hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games – will demolish the station, a neighbouring commercial building, and a seven-storey building that has never been occupied. Together, Fabio reports, the total volume of the buildings to be blasted is in the region of 15,500 cubic metres.

Based on past experience, we will be watching the news wires on Sunday morning an anticipation of what promises to be another big blast.

During our daily sift through the vast expanses of the YouTube library, we came across this new two-part video detailing the high reach demolition of a tower block int he German city of Stuttgart.

We know very little else about the video, aside from the fact that it was shot by artist Jens Walko and that the second part has a Twin Peaks-esque soundtrack. But lovers of high reach excavators will enjoy this:

It’s cold out there; really cold. Thankfully, Demolition News Towers is centrally-heated, has ready access to an almost limitless supply of hot coffee and a large smelly dog upon which to rest cold feet.

But we are ever-mindful that, in the demolition world, we are among the privileged few for whom weather is merely a subject for small talk; a phenomenon that takes place on the other side of the double-glazing.

So what are you doing to keep warm on site today? We have heard tale of one demolition pro donning a flourescent 1980s ski suit to keep the cold at bay, and earlier this week we witnessed the strange allure of a mobile crusher’s warm engine canopy on a team of workers in West London.

So reach for the cameras and the mobile phones and send us your photos of what you’re (and your colleagues) doing to keep warm during this Siberian blast and we will post them here on DemolitionNews.