UK manufacturer swift to act over machine copies on show at Bauma.

While other exhibitors and visitors were enjoying the sunshine, sausages and schnapps that give Bauma its distinctice flavour (and smell) JCB was in court, applying for court orders in Germany resulting in preliminary injunctions being served against manufacturers who were exhibiting the infringing machines at the Munich show. As a result of the action, the machines were removed from the show and impounded or concealed from view.

Tim Burnhope, JCB’s Group Managing Director of Product Development and Commercial Operations, said: “JCB will not tolerate blatant copying of its machines or infringement of internationally-recognised patents and in every instance will act quickly and decisively to stamp out such unfair practices.

“JCB invests many years and many millions of pounds developing and innovating new products and it’s clearly unfair for any manufacturer to then simply free-ride on the results of that investment and research. As an industry we all have to unite to prevent such unlawful practices. ”

The action in Germany concerned infringement of JCB’s intellectual property rights on its backhoe loader and Loadall machines.

We were hoping to run a competition to identify the manufacturer of the offending machine hidden beneath the tarpaulin in our photo but (a) JCB aren’t saying, and (b) we figure the offending manufacturer now has some understanding of German law courts and may just sue us.

So instead, we are offering a 100% genuine, JCB-approved, 1:25 scale JCB 8016 mini excavator model with three attachments for whoever comes up with the most amusing caption for the photo above. Please just hit “Comments” below and let us have your suggestions.

European Demolition Association is heading for Poland; and we’re going with them!

The European Demolition Association is heading Eastwards, taking its latest conference to the city of Warsaw in Poland for the first time. The EDA Spring Conference, which will mark the end of Yves Canessa’s reign as EDA president and the beginning of Giuseppe Panseri’s tenure in the role, will take place from 27 to 29 May 2010 and is scheduled to cover a multitude of timely topics including:

• The EDA High Reach Guidance Notes
• Launch of the EDA’s EU Alert Project
• Decontamination of Hazardous Waste
• Reducing the Administrative Burden

And we’re delighted to announce that Demolition News will be in attendance, gathering news and views, recording both audio and video content and, technology-allowing, broadcasting live from the Westin Hotel venue.

For further details fo the event and to see an English version of the event’s programme, please click here.

If you’re planning to be in Warsaw for what promises to be an interesting event, please be sure to come and say hello. If you’re not, please watch this site for updates and news from the event.

From storming machine gun posts to felling houses, Herb Campbell’s done it all.

We’ve all heard the expression: Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Well, machine operator and demolition man Herb Campbell has been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and worn it out dozens of times. And at 85 years young, he’s still happiest behind the controls of his Kobelco ED190 Bladerunner excavator.

As demonstrated in this excellent article from Florida’s Jacksonvile Times, Herb’s tale is of a live lived; of a love of machines that has seen him felling Japanese machine gun posts with a Caterpillar D8; and of the invention of his own system to prevent beach erosion.

It’s a great article about a fascinating guy – Check it out here.

China reverts to type with yet another enforced demolition death.

You probably need to understand how things work here at Demolition News Towers in order to understand how we can change our minds quite so quickly. We have set up a bank of news feeds that draw in information on demolition and demolition-related issues from across the globe and we react to them literally as they arrive.

Which is why we’re left looking rather stupid and naive this morning having suggested that China was mending its ways on enforced demolitions just 11 minutes before news of another enforced demolition death in the country landed on our screens.

The latest news involves a woman who was crushed under a truck minutes after her mother consumed pesticide to protest the forced demolition of their house in North China’s Hebei province on Sunday. The incident, which occurred in Zhangjiaying village of Xingtai, is the latest in a string of tragedies caused by forced demolitions that have been widely criticized.

The State Council Legislative Affairs Office has started making amendments to the Regulations on Demolishing Urban Housing, banning the use of violence, threat or illegal means to force the relocation of property owners, like cutting off electricity, water, heating and gas. But the revision is still in process.

On April 18, Hu Xifeng had an altercation with the village chief who had brought a team of workers to flatten her house, the China News Service reported on Wednesday.

When all efforts to stop the demolition failed, Hu drank pesticide. But even that did not deter the workers from driving a truck into Hu’s house, crushing her daughter, Meng Jianfeng, to death and injuring Hu’s sister, Hu Qiaofeng, who has been hospitalized. Both Hu Xifeng and Hu Qiaofeng are now out of danger.

The local police have launched an investigation into what the local government has termed a “safety accident”.

Read the full story here.

Eyesore of unfinished homes face wrecking crews as city clamps down.

In news that will gladden the hearts of local lawn service and weed spraying companies, an Albuquerque home builder only has six weeks to get some of his homes in shape, or else the city will tear them down. The unfinished properties were built by Longford Homes and have become crime magnets and eyesores for more than a year.

Neighbors say the group of homes have become well known for attracting prostitution, illegal dumping, break-ins, burglaries, vandalism, even a couple having sex in a garage, since Eyewitness News 4 broke the story last year.

One way or another, the problem will end by June 1st. That’s the deadline city officials have given Longford Homes to restart construction and clean up the weeds and garbage. If that deadline is not met, the city will roll in its bulldozers and flatten five or six of the problematic homes at a cost of more than $60,000 to the taxpayers.

You can read the full story here or watch the Eyewitness News video below.

Chinese official behind enforced demolition jailed for 11 years.

It may be the world’s most populated nation and it may boast the world’s fastest-growing economy but, where demolition is concerned, China appears to have cornered the market in bad news.

In previous months, we have seen people setting themselves on fire and another buried alive as they protested about the enforced demolition of their homes. But thankfully, it appears that the tide may at last be turning with the news that an official in east China Anhui Province has been jailed for 11 years for taking bribes and abusing his power to help a forced demolition that led to the house owner’s suicide.

Cao Yingzhang, vice head of Yingchuan District in Fuyang City, received the sentence from a county court on Monday.

The court also confiscated 100,000 yuan (US$14,651) he received in bribes from property developers, Beijing Times reported today.

House owner Chen Shaokun drank a bottle of pesticide in November 2008 after a demolition crew beat up his son’s wife, broke her nose, and tore down his house without his consent. Since then, he has been in a vegetative state.

Fuyang city government started the eviction plan in May 2008 to widen the street. Chen refused to move because he did not agree with the compensation plan.

Read the full story here.

Bidding war breaks out between lawn services company and weed spraying company.

Way back at the beginning of September last year, Demolition News interviewed the US National Demolition Association’s Ray Passeno and Mike Taylor about the bidding war that was (and still is) raging in the US demolition sector; the fact that many local contractors were searching further afield for much-needed work; and the fact that tenders were attracting the interest of companies with little or no demolition experience.

During that interview (which you can hear here), Mike Taylor memorably coined the phrase “Bob the Landscaper” to describe a man with a machine who, with no work in his chosen field of endeavour, decides to venture into the demolition business to help keep his business afloat.

That throw-away remark has now proved to be strangely prophetic with the news that a bidding war has broken out between a lawn services company and a weed spraying firm over a demolition and land clearing job for the Bloomfield School District.

The confusing and ongoing dispute relates to a proposed settlement to the original low bidder, who was later shunned when a negotiated price was agreed upon with another contractor. Local newspaper The Greene County Daily World has learned the school district may offer Kramer Custom Weed Spraying and Land Clearing LLC of Linton an undisclosed amount of money. The offer will represent the anticipated profit margin that Kramer would have made on the job. Kramer told the Greene County Daily World on Tuesday that the amount he told the school district that he would have made on the job exceeds $1,000.

The full story can be read here and, not surprisingly, it concentrates primarily upon the local politics of the bidding war. What it fails to address, however, is the fact that the two front-runners in a demolition bidding war are clearly not demolition contractors. While the contract clearly contains some land clearance, does anyone really believe that a weed spraying company is the ideal candidate for any kind of demolition?

Either way, perhaps NDA chief executive Mike Taylor can now add “prophet” to his CV.

UK demolition contractor fined for allowing son to work on pub roof without scaffolding.

The Health and Safety Executive prosecuted Ivan Pope after two men were spotted dismantling the roof of a disused pub in Lincolnshire using just the upturned bucket of an excavator to work from.

Leicester Crown Court heard that between 16 and 25 January 2008, Mr Pope, trading as Westwise Demolition, was demolishing the former Manvers Arms public house on Monks Road in Lincoln. The demolition involved piece-by-piece removal of the two storey pub’s roof tiles.

One man sat on the roof, removing tiles and passing them to the son of the defendant, who was standing in the upturned bucket of an excavator positioned level with the edge of the roof.

Once the bucket filled with tiles, Mr Pope’s son climbed onto the roof before the bucket was lowered, emptied and raised back up; he then climbed back in and carried on the task.

There was no scaffolding to prevent the men on the roof from falling and nothing to protect those working below from any tiles dropped or dislodged during these activities.

Mr Pope, of Hassock Hill Drove, Gorefield, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire pleaded guilty to two counts of breaching Section 3 (2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 for failing to ensure people not in his employment were not exposed to risks to their safety.

He was today fined £6,000 and ordered to pay £13,483 costs by Leicester Crown Court.

Read more here.

Closure of Construction Equipment magazine will have widespread repercussions.

Those of you that read these idle ramblings on a regular basis will recall that, late last year, we lamented the sad passing of the UK construction magazines Contract Journal and Plant Managers Journal after their owner – Reed Business Information – decided it was no longer willing to prop up these ailing titles in the face of declining advertising revenues. You might also recall my own personal sadness at this unfortunate turn of events, Contract Journal being the magazine upon which I cut my journalistic teeth.

However, sentimentality aside, the closure of these two magazines was, perhaps, inevitable. Starved on investment, they had long failed to compete with other UK construction magazines and were a shadow of their former selves. And, in some areas, they had no-one to blame but themselves. Without wishing to hark back to the “good ol’ days”, it is certainly true that the journalistic make-up of these magazines had changed, and not for the better. Twenty years ago, the editorial staff included qualified civil engineers and construction professionals; the equipment was written about by people that had bought, sold and operated it. They were of the industry. Today, however, trade magazines are the domain of journeyman journalists who have written everything from computers to construction, or for ambitious youngsters for whom a spell of writing about diggers is merely a stepping stone towards national newspaper journalism.

Like the dust cloud from an Icelandic volcano, the fallout from the failure of these magazines continues to have an impact. Construction News, the last remaining weekly construction title, now has a near monopoly and can do more or less as it wishes without fear of competition, including putting its content behind a paid firewall which means that readers have to fork out cash each time they read a new article. Rather than cropping up on new or existing magazines, the editorial team behind Contract Journal now haunts the online hinterland that, for many, is the elephant’s graveyard of journalism. And, worst of all, the UK construction business loses a valuable and often insightful source of news and information.

Why am I mentioning this now? Well, quite simply, because Reed Business Information has now repeated its construction magazine culling with the shocking and unexpected closure of US title Construction Equipment, a leader in its field for some 60 years.

But while the ultimate effect will be the same, if not worse, the circumstances could not be more different. The journalists behind Construction Equipment were the top of their game, the “grand fromage” of the mobile equipment sector. In fact, when I first picked up my journalist’s notepad some quarter of a century ago, my then editor handed me a copy of Construction Equipment and said, simply: “THAT is what you’re aiming for”.

Unlike its UK Reed stablemate, Construction Equipment HAD successfully made the offline to online transition. Indeed, it was some of the machine test videos and other online content from the likes of Rod Sutton and Larry Stewart that helped shape Demolition News. It was also the reason that I was honoured to write a regular Demolition Digest blog for what was the world’s largest and most widely-read construction equipment magazine.

Sadly, Reed’s determination to divest itself of paper-based business-to-business publishing, combined with a recessionary decline in available advertising revenue, has brought all of this to an untimely end. And sixty years after setting the standard for the industry, the world’s foremost source of mobile equipment news, views and insight has closed its doors.

And the global construction sector will be poorer for its passing.

Texaco Beacon Research Center to be demolished to allow assessment of contamination.

Demolition is expected to begin soon at the former Texaco Beacon Research Center in the Fishkill hamlet of Glenham. The purpose is the assessment and removal of contamination at the site.

Mark Hendrickson, project manager for Chevron Environmental Management Co., said 43 of the site’s 64 buildings will be taken down to their foundations after asbestos remediation is completed.

“The site is inactive, and we would like to put it back to productive use,” he said.

The former research center is in the Fishkill hamlet of Glenham.

A textile mill was built on the site in 1811. It closed in 1875 due to financial hardship, but reopened under new owners. That business closed its doors in 1929.

Texaco purchased the property in 1931, renovating the former mill to become a crude oil refining research facility.

Expansion, including above-ground storage tanks, took place until 1980. Texaco and Chevron merged in 2001.

At its peak, the center employed about 1,200 people.

A decrease in research activities led to the closure of the facility in 2003. The storage tanks were demolished the same year.

Hendrickson said a lot of investigation into contamination has been done over the years. “Basically, under the (foundation) slabs are some of the last remaining places to look,” he said.

Once the structures are demolished, Hendrickson said, technicians will drill through the concrete slabs to sample the soil underneath.

Read the full story here.