Workers hired to demolish old Hershey plant claim they are being exposed to asbestos

Workers demolishing the Old Hershey Chocolate Plant say they’re facing health and safety hazards. They claim the company they work for ASI of Maryland, fails to meet federal requirements for asbestos removal.

In November, Derry Township officials approved a request to demolish portions of the Hershey Company’s old Chocolate Factory. But now workers hired to remove portions of the building are claiming they are needlessly exposed to the cancer causing substance asbestos.

Ernest Ojito spent a year in college working undercover and studying working conditions for asbestos workers and the dangers facing the public. He now works for the Labor International Union of North America on behalf of workers at the Hershey demolition.

Ojito says the company isn’t following procedure. “He says the first issue on the job site with the safety is that they are not wetting down the Asbestos. Asbestos needs to be wet down before you remove it.”

He calls this an industry-wide problem, contaminating workers and mis-classifying workers leading to lower wages.

Read more here or view the video below:

New appointment puts parts sales at the forefront of company’s operations.

ECY Haulmark has appointed Nicola Kirkby to head up the parts sales operations across the company’s entire business.

Kirkby (pictured leftwith Furukawa Rock Drill managing director Mark Okamoto and ECY Haulmark’s Rick Yarwood) brings with her a considerable amount of parts and industry experience having previously worked with Blue Group, and has ambitions for the future.

“I work on the basis that a salesman sells the first machine but it’s the aftersales support that sells the second, third and fourth machine. Customers today have very high demands. They want parts quickly and efficiently and they also want them to be priced competitively,” Kirkby says. “ECY Haulmark already has a reputation for offering some top quality brands. I want our parts business to be of a similar quality.”

Richard Yarwood says he is delighted to have secured Kirkby’s experience and believes she will be a valuable addition to his team. “Parts are already our biggest seller, outstripping brands like FRD, VTN, OilQuick and Rubblemaster,” he concludes. “But with Nicola’s experience and ability to concentrate on this vital part of our business, I have high hopes for the future.”

Large section of GM Pontiac assembly plant falls to excavator might.

Our second favourite demolition video maker (Django is our favourite because they do ours!) Stephen SetteDucati has been at it again.

This time, he has brought his skill and creativity to bear on a video that captures the pulling down of a row of steel vent stacks at the GM Pontiac East assembly plant.

GoPro camera gets up close to the action Down Under.

Over the past few years, we have seen just about every demolition video known to mankind. We’ve had time-lapse, panning shots, tracking shots, in-cab shots and even demolition shot spookily in reverse.

But this is the first time we have seen demolition from a dipper’s eye view.

The highly creative footage comes courtesy of Neil Rosenlund, managing director of Australian demolition outfit Rosenlund Contractors PTY and was shot in Brisbane recently.

Blast drops bridge with no replacement in sight.

About 200 very chilly-looking local residents turned out for the implosion of the St. Jean Baptiste Bridge on Saturday.

The blast went off about 9 a.m. and the bridge immediately sank into the Red River. Rakowski Cartage and Wrecking is in charge of the demolition and clean up.

The bridge spans the Red River. The town of St. Jean Baptiste is now cut off on the east side. People have received no word from the province yet on whether they will receive a new bridge or how long it might take to replace.

The bridge was built in 1947. Its piers had become unstable.

The demise of high reach innovator Rusch marks the end of an era

There was a time when it seemed like the party would never end. Work was plentiful, margins were healthy, and the global demolition industry looked ever upward. It was a trend that was marked most notably by the race for the biggest high reach machine; a kind of mechanical penis envy that saw machines rise from 30 to 60 and ultimately to 90 metres in just a few short years.

But the party did end. And so began the hangover.

The global recession invited upon us by greedy bankers and misguided politicians served up a large-scale reality check to remind demolition contractors that size doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as utilisation levels.

And the Rusch TUHD90, all 90 metres of it, personified that hangover. Lauded as an engineering triumph upon its launch, the machine ultimately did less work than a benefit scrounger. Engineering issues, a long-running wrangle between manufacturer and customer, a dearth of contracts requiring 90 metres of reach, and a scarcity of operators sufficiently competent to handle such a monster combined to make the TUHD90 a sad and overly ambitious mobile memorial to those heady pre-recession days.

Certainly, the TUHD90 was not perfect; far from it. But that is the nature of innovation. That is why the iPhone was not the first ever mobile phone; and that is why very few of us still drive Model T Ford motor cars.

Every field of human endeavour requires a person to push the envelope; someone bold, brave and even foolhardy enough to go where no man has gone before. Ruud Schriejer of Rusch is just such a man.

Want proof? While most of us looked on in horror as the BP Deepwater Horizon platform spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Schreijer was at his drawing board devising a submersible demolition shear that could shut off the gushing pipeline.

Sadly, with innovation comes risk. And although the machine that unexpectedly shed its counterweight killing fellow pioneer Ad Swanink back in January 2011 was not the same machine that originally rolled out of the Rusch factory, the mud stuck and the Rusch name was tarnished, perhaps irrevocably, from that moment on.

The company did bounce back with the launch of the RS 4500 high reach, a machine that promised to move Rusch from bespoke modifier to “volume producer” status. But, even though the machine was a contender in the 2012 Demolition Awards, the high capital cost price of the unit coupled with an ongoing global recession was ultimately to sound the death knell for the company that had come to prominence in markedly better times.

When the gates close for the last time on Monday, Schreijer and his family will have lost their business, and some very talented designers and engineers will have lost their jobs. And the industry will have lost another innovator and pioneer.

Demolition will be poorer for their demise.

Maker of world’s largest high reach excavator succumbs to economic pressures.

Rusch, the manufacturing company behind the largest high reach excavator ever to grace a demolition site, will close the gates of its factory for the final time on Monday.

The company, which first made the global demolition headlines with the development of a 90 metre high reach, has been the subject of intense speculation for more than a year.

However, earlier today, managing director Ruud Schreijer confirmed to DemolitionNews that the rumours were true this time and that Monday will mark the company’s last day.

The reasons behind the decision have not yet been made public, although a general slowing of the global demolition sector and – although exonerated – the fallout from the accident involving the 90 metre TUHD90 machine that killed Ad Swanink will certainly not have helped the company’s fortunes.

There were hopes that the company had put those troubles behind it with the development of the RS 4500 high reach, a machine that was a contender in last year’s Demolition Awards. But saddled with a high cost price in the midst of a global recession meant that the new unit was slow to find favour.

“It is a pity we could not prove to the industry that the RS 4500 is a good machine to make money with, despite the high purchase price,” Ruud Schreijer says. “We have tried and we lost.”

Charleston Department of Highways forced to change bridge demolition plans.

The Dick Henderson Bridge will go out with a bang after all.

The state Division of Highways announced that it has changed its demolition plans for the remaining portions of the Richard “Dick” Henderson Memorial Bridge, which used to connect the cities of Nitro and St. Albans.

Crews from Kokosing Construction had been slowly dismantling the bridge’s steel superstructure. They removed the first portion of the bridge’s center last Thursday.

But division spokeswoman Carrie Bly said that as crews began cutting into sections of the bridge closer to the river bank, they realized they needed to change their plans.

“The remaining steel was heavier than they anticipated and it’s too heavy to lift,” Bly said.

Kokosing workers now plan to shoot explosives onto the remaining portions and blast them apart.

Read more here.

Franchisees left in the dark as hydraulic hose provider calls it a day.

DemolitionNews can exclusively reveal that BMI Hose (UK) Ltd, the hydraulic hose replacement company, has closed its doors.

Phone calls to the company’s Wolverhampton headquarters are going unanswered and the dozen or so franchise operations that stretch from Bristol to Glasgow are in the dark about their futures.

When we asked an unnamed spokesman at BMI Reading about rumours of the company’s demise, he answered simply: “You probably know more than we do. All we know is that they closed their doors yesterday and nobody has heard from the since.” Another at BMI London – which is not a franchise – confirmed that BMI Hose UK had gone into receivership.

Social media networks have reacted quickly with numerous independent hose replacement companies offering to help customers in light of BMI’s sudden disappearance.

BMI Hose opened for business in August 2007. In November of the same year, the first service centre opened in Dudley. This was quickly followed by BMI Newcastle-upon-Tyne, BMI Reading, and BMI Bristol which all opened in early 2008. In September 2008, the company acquired Hiflex Fluidpower to become the UK’s second largest provider of emergency on-site hose replacements behind Pirtek.

Story Update Here

Caterpillar Work Tools video extols virtues of versatile attachment.

This new video from the mighty Caterpillar takes a closer look at the use of sorting grapples in a demolition and recycling environment by looking through the eyes of David Bahm of Kansas-based Bahm Demolition.

Experienced demolition folk will probably not learn a great deal about working methods, but the footage is high quality, and Bahm offers some great insights into how – together with his daughter – he runs his business.