Armoury Group announces appointment of new business development director.

Construction-specialist and architect, Jim McEwan has joined Armoury as the company prepares to launch its new Northern office in Sheffield.

With over 20 years of experience across a number of construction disciplines in both the public and private sector, McEwan boasts an extensive knowledge of the industry which will bolster the business development arm of the existing team.

Formerly of Keltbray and Controlled Demolition, where he worked with a number of major blue-chip companies including Westfield, Balfour Beatty and Bovis Lend Lease, Jim has many years proven skills at fostering new client relationships and identifying business opportunities to secure greater market visibility.
Within this new role, Jim will predominantly be responsible for the strategic development of new business opportunities and clients and maximising service provisions across the UK.

Tony McLean, managing director of Armoury Group comments, “Jim’s appointment is a significant move for Armoury as it clearly highlights our intention to strengthen our position within the industry and initiate new business growth throughout the coming year and beyond.

“Jim joins us with an excellent pedigree and impressive cross-sector experience which will provide us with increased flexibility to gain an enviable market advantage. With his remarkable credentials, he will make an outstanding addition to the team.”

Engineering company says demolish Buckingham Palace to make the Queen green.

A nefarious plot to destroy Buckingham Palace has been exposed, but it’s not the work of terrorists, anarchists or extremist property developers. No, this one comes from an engineering consultancy. Before the capital goes on high alert, Atkins, a design and engineering group, weren’t actually intending to carry out this plan. In a none-too-serious assessment of the building’s green credentials, rather, they dropped the hint – or was it a gauntlet? – that the Queen might be better off with a new London eco-crib.

Atkins’s proposal was part of a fanciful survey by Construction Manager magazine into how much it might cost to rebuild British landmarks. It concluded that you could build a new energy-efficient replica of the palace for a knock-down £320m (Stonehenge would be £815m, but it’s hard to see how you could make a collection of stones any greener). Among other improvements, the report suggested replacing the palace’s 760 sash windows with double-glazed replicas, and installing photovoltaic panels, ground-source heat pumps and masses of insulation. With such changes, the royal carbon footprint would be 400 tonnes of CO² lighter every year, it estimates, and the palace’s £2.2m utilities bill would be slashed by 90%.

Read the full story here.

New video from Stephen SetteDucati pits wrecking ball against high reach excavator.

Demolition News regulars will know that we’re huge fans of the work of Stephen SetteDucati at ssdphoto and his video work with the likes of Testa Corp. But his latest really is one to admire, as it pits an “old school” crawler crane and wrecking ball against the young pretender in the shape of a high reach excavator.

The two machines were filmed side-by-side on a Testa Corp contract in Lowell, Massachusets where the company was charged with taking down a pair of cold storage warehouses.

The wrecking ball footage really is one for the purists and is a great display of power, while the precision on the high reach excavator allows it to match the wrecking ball productivity-wise.

Which is best? You decide, and let us know:

An excavator driver had a lucky escape when his machine tipped over a bridge.

An excavator working on the rehab project of the Route 1A Hampton Harbor Bridge tipped over Friday morning, Jan. 23 causing it to dangle over the side railing and onto the beach.

Denis Switzer, of the state Department of Transportation, said the excavator was on the bridge removing a section of concrete at the time of the incident.

“They were removing a curb from the bridge as part of the demolition process,” Switzer said. “The excavator picked up the piece to load it into the truck but before it could make it into the truck, it tipped.”

The excavator, he said, rolled over on the bridge rail and sidewalk while the arm hung over the beach area.

“The concrete was too much weight,” Switzer said.

Read more here.

Environmentalists drawing up plans to handle the building waste from the Haiti earthquake.

Just a week after Haiti’s catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake, getting aid to victims remains a top priority, but experts are also now starting to assess how to coordinate the sorting and disposing of building rubble.

So far, no large industrial spills have been found. The biggest environmental issue, according to the United Nations Environment Program, is dealing with all of the building waste generated by the earthquake, which destroyed at least 40-50 percent of the buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and devastated other towns in the area.

“Waste management resulting from the earthquake and the devastation of buildings is the biggest environmental concern right now because dealing with this is a precondition for getting everything else done,” said Muralee Thummarukudy of the Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch of the United Nations Environment Program, who arrived in Haiti on Tuesday to coordinate environmental efforts.

Click here for more.

Demolition cited as example to architectural salvage industry.

After years of frustrated effort a broadly based group of established dealers assembled in Worplesdon to found a national trade association. The working title R.I.T.A. (Reclamation Industry Trade Association) was adopted, together with a Government approved constitution. Steve Tomlin (MASCo) was elected its first Chairman. Kate Jarrold (Robert Mills Ltd) its founder Honorary Secretary.

Interestingly, according to this blog post on the excellent Masco Savage website, the development and evolution of the modern demolition industry has provided the inspiration for this new association.

“…The core demolition industry from which many of us emerged has far and away outstripped all other elements of the trade in its conversion to the twenty-first century. The old demolition industry that believed it had no need to regard the working conditions of its staff and public safety has been swept away in a decade of transformation. The modern demolition trade is highly skilled, safety aware and mechanised beyond recognition. The demands of method statements, risk analyses and CDM regulations are the everyday grist and staple of demolition…”

Read more here.

Need to meet green targets could signal boom time for UK demolition contractors.

Huge expanses of British town and city centres built in the Sixties and Seventies may have to be torn down to meet carbon emission standards for buildings.

In an interview with The Times, the Government’s new chief construction adviser said that there may be no choice but to demolish buildings put up in those decades because it is impossible to refurbish them to a sufficiently high standard.

Paul Morrell, who took up his new post at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills at the end of November last year, said: “In the Sixties, everything was built cheaper, faster and nastier. If you are going to try to fix buildings, then really you won’t have too many problems with anything built earlier than the Fifties or after the Eighties. Although you can do some things to buildings from the Sixties and Seventies, like replacing the roofs, there are probably some places that need to come down entirely.”

Read the full story here.

Russian man threatens to use pet leopard to protect his home from the wrecking ball.

Whenever possible, we like to put an interesting or amusing spin on an industry story. But occasionally, a story comes along that, frankly, is stranger than anything that our addled brains could concoct. Like this one, for example:

A Russian man said he will employ the assistance of his pet leopard in defending his Moscow home from demolition.

Sergie Bobyshev, of the Rechnik settlement, a rural area of the Russian capital, said the residents of the area were granted the land during the era of Soviet rule, RIA Novosti reported Sunday.

“We will fight to the bitter end,” Bobyshev said, adding that his “very affectionate pet cat” will help him keep officials and construction workers away.

Reports that Moscow sales of catnip have quadrupled since this story broke are yet to be verified.

Read more here.

Demolition work is underway at historic Pittsburgh locomotive works.

For more than 50 years, in the dozen or so red brick buildings at the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works on the North Side, men made steam engines for railway companies all across America and beyond.

In the carpenter and pattern shop, iron and brass foundries, machine shop, engine room, smith shop, paint shop, flask shop, cupola house, boiler shop and other smaller buildings, men worked to design and produce locomotive engines — some 2,400 of them by the time the company merged with seven other plants to form American Locomotive Co. in 1901.

Now demolition has begun on the former locomotive works buildings, long owned by Duquesne Light, and this year all of them will come down. The utility, which had used them for storage and office space, moved its employees out last summer.

“It is in a very poor state of disrepair,” said company spokesman Joseph Vallarian. “It’s becoming dangerous” for employees.

Read more here.

Valley’s $32.4 million application ‘does not demonstrate any experience with demolition’.

Evaluations from two U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employees described the Mahoning Valley’s $32.4 million housing proposal as incomplete, unclear and flawed.

The nine-community proposal sought to use $7.9 million of the funding to demolish 1,603 structures. The application needed to demonstrate the Valley had demolished at least 75 units in the past two years.

Youngstown, alone, took down 200 houses in the second half of 2009.

But the application “does not demonstrate any experience with demolition,” a requirement to be considered for funding, according to a seven-page summary compiled by two unnamed HUD employees who reviewed it.

“The applicant does not expressly detail the number of demolished units over the past 24 months,” one evaluator wrote in the review. “With demolition such a significant portion of the application, this could be an issue.”

Read more here.