Copper theft arrest highlights pernicious problem of on-site theft.

A man hired to help demolish the Bleachery has been charged with stealing copper wire from the old mill site on White Street. Juan Romero, 35, of Salisbury, N.C., was charged with petty larceny last week after being accused of stealing the wiring, according to a Rock Hill police report. A witness told police he saw Romero putting wire in a backpack and take it from the demolition site starting last Wednesday. (Read more here).

This set us to thinking. While equipment theft is a high-profile issue that is often discussed with national and international police forces becoming increasingly well-equipped to deal with this well-established and highly expensive problem.

But what of these so-called petty thefts of materials that often fly under the industry radar. We’re all aware that they happen, and with fluctuating copper prices often making such thefts lucrative, are we seeing an escalation?

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so we have created a new question over on the Forum.

Implosion brings end to demolition of Hydra Clarkson headquarters.

Rotherham-based DSR Demolition has imploded the landmark Hydra Clarkson building on Sheffield’s Penistone Road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the South Yorkshire city.

Farmer builds his own cannon to defend his property against demolition.

Regardless of the fact that we’re usually 100% behind any form of demolition, the enforced demolition of so-called Chinese nail houses is a process that we simply cannot condone or defend, particularly when it has led to the death of numerous Chinese citizens killed whilst trying to defend their homes.

But news reaches us that one Chinese farmer has decided to fight fire with fire by building his own cannon to fend off “attackers”.

Yang Youde, aged 56, has a house and a vegetable patch near Jinyinhu part of Dongxihu District in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province, where some developers wanted to start a project in 2009. However, before the two sides agree on the compensation, the developer hired security guard to tear down his house.

Angered by the forced defoliation, he made a blockhouse on top of his house, and beat back the “attackers” twice using his home-made cannon.

Read more here.

Statistics from latest weekly newsletter reveal readers’ true areas of interest.

One of the great things about communicating with our readers electronically via the web and email is the ability to track exactly what it is that grabs your interest.

Over recent months, it has become apparent, for example, that while text content is popular, audio is more so, and that video is more popular still. It’s also clear that while videos of people speaking always achieves a high number of hits, videos of machines in action achieve considerably more.

But now, just hours after we issued our latest This Week in Demolition email newsletter, we have uncovered an even greater degree of interest in a subject matter not normally associated with the demolition industry: Pornography!

In our intro, we stated that demolition was as “unpredictable as a sword-wielding porn star” (you can click the link yourselves to see the relevance) and have watched the stats racking up ever since to become one of our “most-visited” links.

We haven’t quite worked out whether the appeal was the porn part or the sword-wielding part but, rest-assured, we’ll be aiming to bring you more of both in the very near future!!

Video captures simultaneous implosion of three Parisian tower blocks.

Former European Demolition Association president Yves Canessa returned from the EDA conference in Wasrsaw less than a week ago and walked straight into the final stages of a major implosion in the Parisian suburbs.

We were hoping to be there but travel plans went horribly awry so here instead is the amateur footage of the implosion.

And, by way of an update, here’s the same contract from a different view, this one courtesy of Yves Canessa himself:

Owner of bridge walks span and talks demolition plans and scrap metal.

The Bellaire Toll Bridge is now under new ownership, right before demolition of the old span is about to take place.

K.D.C Investments out of North Carolina purchased the bridge from Eric Kelly within the past few days. Now, all those involved are waiting on the U.S. Coast Guard to review and approve demolition plans.

The two step process includes the actual preparatory work and the explosives process. It could be Monday or Tuesday of next week when plans will be approved. Once the bridge is demolished by Advanced Explosives Demolition and Delta Demolition out of Wilmington, North Carolina, the iron and steel will be then sold.

Read more here.

Californian contractor in fatal collapse did not have license.

A California contractor was not licensed in Hawaii to perform a 2009 demolition job that resulted in the death of a worker at Campbell Industrial Park, a Star-Bulletin investigation has found.

AG Transport needed a contractor’s license to perform the demolition of Hawaiian Cement’s preheating tower in Hawaii, but didn’t have one – as required by state law, Verna Oda, executive officer of the state Contractors License Board, told the Star-Bulletin.

State Labor Director Darwin Ching has not responded to the newspaper’s query about the level of demolition competence of AG Transport, including its lack of a Hawaii contractor’s license and why the information was not included in the Labor Department’s investigation of the accident.

Read the full story here.

New wrecking ball video game is in advanced stages of development.

It seems that producers of video games have an endless fascination with this industry of ours – regular readers will recall our previous reports on the games Demolition Company and Demolition City.

But it appears that even these two popular (and addictive) games cannot satisfy the gaming industry’s desire to play with “big boys toys” so it comes as no great surprise to learn that yet another demolition-based game is in development.

Although details are somewhat scant at present, the leaked graphics suggest that the new game will follow a similar style to that of Demolition City but will put the player at the controls of a crawler crane/wrecking ball rather than arming them with an inexhaustible supply of high explosives.

Apparently, the game is still more than a month away; plenty of time to disconnect my Internet connection to ensure that I don’t fall under the addicitive spell of yet another online productivity killer!

Read more here.

The World Cup is just a week away…so which team are you following.

OK, so the sun is out, it’s a Friday afternoon, God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. So we’re just putting demolition to one side to talk about something else for just a second.

In seven days time, the eyes of the football (soccer, if you prefer) world will turn towards South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, a once-every-four-years excuse for nationalism, jingoism and unexpected illness that just happen to coincide with your chosen country’s next fixture (not a problem in this office; there’s a 50 inch plasma tuned almost permanently to Sky Sports!!)

So, given that we have a global and almost exclusively male audience, we thought we’d invite you to let us know which countries you will be supporting, which country you expect to win, and which country you would love to see knocked out first.

We’ll start the ball rolling, predictably, as follows:

Supporting – England
Expected Winners – Brazil
Most like to see knocked out – France

Please use the comments area (in blue, below) to let us have your thoughts.

Oh, and by the way…

COME ON ENGLAND!!

National Geographic Channel releases demolition “Tools of the Trade” video.

OK, the voiceover is aimed at people that have never set foot on a demolition site in their lives, but this video focus on Ahrens’ demolition of St Louis’ Bush Stadium is still worth a viewing.