Contractor stripped of accreditation during crackdown on demolition crime in wake of quake.

Civil Defence has warned it will crack down on criminal activity by demolition companies in Christchurch after two men were arrested in the red zone on Friday.

Police said a 54-year-old demolition worker and a 41-year-old company director were arrested. They were alleged to have breached the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act.

“Civil Defence has withdrawn access and or accreditation for one individual and for one company,” national controller Steve Brazier said. Neither police nor Civil Defence would reveal which company was involved.

Last week, Canterbury police district commander Superintendent Dave Cliff said there had been complaints of demolition companies taking goods from demolished buildings.

Read more here.

AM Environmental stands accused of falsifying pre-demolition asbestos test results.

A Lower Mainland asbestos removal and demolition contractor is facing a possible jail term after being charged by WorkSafeBC with allegedly putting employees’ lives at risk by letting them work unwittingly on homes that contained asbestos.

Earlier this month, the Workers’ Compensation Board asked the B.C. Supreme Court to jail Arthur Moore of AM Environmental for 120 days for contempt of court in an action which began in July last year.

At that time, the board received an injunction from the B.C. Supreme Court ordering Moore to cease his activities in the asbestos abatement business.

The injunction was sought following an investigation of Moore’s activities by WorkSafeBC inspectors that allegedly revealed he was forging laboratory certificates showing homes waiting demolition were clear of asbestos contamination.

However, a number of the homes were shown to contain asbestos when samples were submitted to laboratory tests, according to court documents.

Read more here.

Town halts demolition of collapsed factory over permit issues.

The demolition of a collapsed factory building on Plymouth’s South Main Street that began on Friday was short lived after town officials got word of the project.

Employees of Waterbury Wrecking had been picking away at the twisted steel beams and siding of the building, owned by Structus LLC, for a few hours, when Mayor Vincent Festa Jr. drove over from Town Hall and told them to stop because the building owners had failed to pay a permit fee.

“Until the demo fee is paid it can’t come down,” said Clarence B. Atkinson, building official.

Read more here.

DemolitionNews brings you an exclusive interview with new NFDC president Gary Bishop.

On Friday 25 March, Bromley Demolition’s Gary Bishop was named as the new president of the UK’s National Federation of Demolition Contractors.

In an exclusive audio interview, DemolitionNews was the first publication to interview Bishop about his aims and ambition for the Federation during his coming two-year presidency, and the challenges he faces.

Just hit the play button below to hear what Bishop had to say.

Exclusive video captures another successful blast from Master Blaster Eric Kelly

Eric Kelly surgically removes 1 of 6 boilers at the old Phillips Power Plant in Crescent, PA. The general contractor on the project was Global Demolition & Enviromental from Maryland.

Wrecker hit by falling debris and excavator profiled in local newspaper.

Not many people trapped under a slab of concrete and an excavator walk away to tell the tale. But just over a month after we reported on an accident that could all too easily have killed him, Sean McMurray is fully recovered and has been profiled in his local newspaper.

On 17 February, McMurray, 51, was working with an apprentice on the second floor, taking down one of the last pieces of flooring on the level, with no idea that minutes later he’d be trapped under a concrete slab, unable to move as an excavator fell onto him.

“We were 75 percent of the way through the project,” McMurray said. “We took every safety precaution.”
With the work on the second floor mostly complete, he sent his apprentice to start work in a different area while he finished. He watched the apprentice work his way down the ladder and turned around.
“It opened up like a trapdoor,” McMurray said of the floor. “I fell down 12 feet and was laying in a cloud of dust. I remember laying down and looking up.”

He was looking up with a concrete slab, weighing thousands of pounds, on top of him, still partially hinged. It covered his body up to the chin, McMurray said. At the time, he was still conscious.

“The last thing I remember,” McMurray said, “there was an electrical excavator still up there. The concrete slab slid another two inches and I couldn’t see anything anymore. I thought to myself, ‘This is gonna be nasty.'”

Read the rest of the story here.

New Zealand police investigate alleged thefts from Christchurch demolition sites.

Police are dealing with complaints of demolition firms taking goods from earthquake-damaged central Christchurch businesses.

Canterbury area commander Superintendent Dave Cliff said yesterday police had been contacted about property being stolen. He would not talk about specific cases.

“It’s not a very large number of issues I’m aware of.” Cliff said it was illegal for demolition companies to take goods from demolished buildings.

“The accredited demolition companies have no rights to charge to salvage property from the buildings they are working on,” he said. “Firms being employed to demolish cannot take property and retain it. It belongs to the owner.”

Cliff said Civil Defence had given assurances that goods taken from buildings would be returned to the owners or tenants.

An inner-city business owner said yesterday he had seen demolition companies take native timber from his demolished building, believed to be in Lichfield St.

“The issue here is that there is a wholesale mandate for looting to go on for contractors. Material has been taken and, had we not been there and seen what happens, then this would have gone on unbeknownst to us,” he told Radio New Zealand.

Read more here.

Independent inspection of collapsed car park exonerates demolition contract.

Back in February, we exclusively brought you the news and photos of a car park collapse in Southend on Sea. At the time, we applauded the transparency of the contractor involved – Elvanite – which openly commented on the collapse and its likely causes.

In keeping with that approach, the company has now provided us with the findings of an independent inspection carried out by IDE presdient John Woodward of C&D Consultancy. Those findings are shown in their entirety below:

“…In my opinion the collapse of the rear section of the car park was caused by the failure of the construction day joints where they had been incorrectly constructed with no reinforcement passing through the joints leaving an unscabbled, unconnected joint interface. This poor standard of construction meant that the joints could have failed at any time during the life of the car park and it is apparent that the work of demolition has imposed vibration and forces into those joints that has caused the failure to occur. Close inspection of the failed area show that the joints had no through reinforcement or dowel connections and the concrete in some areas was either smooth, preventing any connection with the adjacent section of slab, or was of poor quality with an extremely sandy consistency throughout which would have led to a lower strength and easier failure of the joints. I consider that the contractor, from the information provided at tender stage, would not have been able to ascertain that there was a possible risk of joint failure…”

Was environmental message lost on the visitors that flocked to Vegas last week?

Caterpillar is the world’s biggest and America’s best known manufacturer of construction and demolition equipment; and where Caterpillar leads, the industry tends to follow. So when the company’s CEO Doug Oberhelman declared at ConExpo that “The Next Generation Starts Here”, he wasn’t just showcasing the Caterpillar sales message; he was setting the agenda for an entire industry.

And Caterpillar wasn’t just talking the talk; it was walking the walk too. One part of the company’s display was designed to be reused and recycled immediately after the show. And in its main display area, many of its 200+ representatives were wielding Apple iPads, wirelessly taking orders and confirming machine availability in the middle of a packed exhibition hall.

Wandering about the Las Vegas Convention Centre, I was struck by the fact that, product wise, there was nothing really new. Sure, there were some upgraded, updated and uprated machines on show. But anyone that left Sin City believing they had seen a revolutionary product has almost certainly been living in a cave for the past 10 years or more.
But if there was an encompassing theme to the show, it was – as Caterpillar rightly said – the harnessing of technology and the protection of the environment.

From a pure technology standpoint, this was by far the most advanced, forward-thinking and “wired” show I have ever attended in my 25+ years in the construction business. The organisers had developed a free iPhone app containing not just a floor plan and map but a detailed scheduler to keep visitors informed of what was going on, where and when. This was further linked to a social networking system that allowed visitors to share their experiences and to let the friends, colleagues and contacts know where they were, what they’d seen. And, on many stands, the age-old convention tradition of business card exchanges had been largely replaced by a more efficient, paperless electronic alternative. There is no question that ConExpo has set the technological benchmark for future exhibitions

For those of us that have been around for long enough to remember when operator’s cabs were considered an optional extra, the replacement of business cards by iPhones was matched in its new-fangledness by the marketing message driving the sales of most of the equipment on display.

There was a time, in the not too distant past, when equipment was measured in terms of horsepower, torque or the amount of “grunt” it developed. Today’s machines pack more grunt than a Swedish porn movie; but nobody talks about it any more. Power for its own sake has almost become a dirty word; an embarrassing secret like that Justin Bieber song on your MP3 player. Modern equipment is measured on a nominal “muesli scale” that balances the amount of fuel that is put in against the amount of emissions it puts out. The 20 tonne, 200 horsepower excavator of yesteryear has been usurped by a Tier III compliant, biodegradable oil sipping machine that is kind to trees and fluffy bunnies, that does volunteer work at its local homeless shelter, and that probably makes its mother’s eyes leak tears of pure pride.

But this is a tale with a sting in it.

The construction equipment sector, like its fancy-pants cousins in the automotive sector, has invested billions to make equipment that is leaner and greener than the products they replace. They have embraced technologies such as diesel/electric hybrid engines and advanced exhaust filtration systems; they have developed engines clean enough to serve as a dinner plate. Hell, these people have even swapped their business cards for iPhones and Blackberries to help save the rainforests.

But then, through a mix of tradition, received wisdom and a need to keep up with the Joneses, this noble, costly and well-intentioned effort is undermined with a single sweep of the marketing manager’s pen.

Best estimates suggest that ConExpo will have attracted somewhere in the region of 130,000 visitors from locations literally across the globe (my flight from Philadelphia alone contained individuals from the UK, the Netherlands, India, China, Italy and Canada). In addition, the show’s hundreds of stands were each manned (or womanned) by staff that had used a variety of planes, trains and automobiles to get to a city that – perhaps fittingly – stands like a beacon of ostentation and excess in the middle of a barren desert. And because no-one but no-one walks anywhere in Las Vegas unless it’s to the bar or the craps table, every one of those visitors, staff or other associated hanger-on was serviced by a seemingly endless procession of cabs, town cars and limousines, each slurping fuel like a parched camel, each belching emissions like a diner at a Mexican cantina.

This is less carbon footprint and more carbon steel-capped boot stomping down upon the green intentions and environmental ambitions of an entire industry.

There is a lesson to be learned here. As an industry, we have accepted that operator cabs are not an option but a necessity; that clean running engines are of benefit to us all; and that it is possible to attend an exhibition without a tree’s worth of business cards in our back pocket.

Our next challenge is to overcome our need to press flesh and kick tyres (or tracks), and to utilise technology to allow us to conduct business without the need to fly halfway around the world.

Good as ConExpo was – and for all I have said above, it really was VERY good – there has been only one real winner from the show; the oil companies that are eking out the last vestiges of rapidly depleting and finite resources. The big loser is Mother Earth, for precisely the same reasons.

And the sad thing is that – as I write this – I realise that for all my hippy ideals and environmental leanings, I am equally (or even more) culpable. My round-trip clocked up around 14,000 air miles and I took a taxi twice a day every day I was there. But, like all journalists, I contributed nothing to the industry, humanity or the planet other than some words that, with hindsight, I might have done almost as well from the comfort of my own home in the UK.

As much as I enjoyed the show and as much as I love the US (how can you fail to love a nation in which turkey bacon – that’s one meat made to taste like another – is proffered as a viable vegetarian sandwich filling), I would find it hard to justify repeating this trip.

Looking back at the two-year NFDC presidency of David Darsey.

Later today, the National Federation of Demolition Contractors will welcome a new president as Gary Bishop takes over the hot seat from current president David Darsey.

Of course, the media focus will be on Gary Bishop – we have already recorded an exclusive audio interview with Bishop to celebrate his incoming presidency – and rightly so. His accession is the culmination of a decade-long journey that has seen him scale the Federation ladder through numerous regional ranks to second vice and vice president.

But we can’t let today pass without a look back at the two-year presidency of David Darsey.

Like his successor, Darsey’s presidency was the culmination of a lifelong ambition. And despite the fact that he took up the reins at precisely the time that the recession caused the industry horse to bolt, his presidency is memorable for its steadfastness.

From the cutting of the ribbon on the Federation’s new head office just a few days after being named president back in March 2009, through insisting that the Federation’s Site Audit Scheme was made a prerequisite of membership, to the backing of several news sets of guidance notes and the “repatriation” of the National Demolition Training Group – The highs of Darsey’s presidency more than outweighed the economic lows that the industry endured while he wore the chains of office.

Darsey’s presidency was further marked by its outgoing and engaging nature. He attended the European Demolition Association conference in Stockholm meeting up with EDA president Giuseppe Panseri and overcoming their language barrier with a shared passion for demolition. Panseri was later Darsey’s guest at the NFDC’s own Demolition Day event in London. And he has been a regular guest at National Demolition Assciation events in the US for the past three years, something he intends to maintain now that his time in office is at an end.

And, of course, Darsey and the team members from his company – Erith Group – conquered last year’s Demolition Awards winning several key trophies including the big one: The World Demolition Contractor of the Year.

The NFDC is the model upon which several other national and international demolition associations were built, and the Federation continues to pride itself on its reputation as the voice of the demolition industry. The fact that the Federation’s top man won the industry’s top award was a fitting and well-earned end to a memorable presidency, and he can take his leave knowing that he is leaving the Federation at unprecedented levels of strength, reputation and influence.

Oh, and he supports the greatest football team in the world,not that this in any way influenced the above!