Australian casino owner will leave rock demolition to the professionals.

Tabcorp Holdings has dealt a blow to Sydneysiders itching to tear down the fibreglass rock in the main atrium of Pyrmont’s Star City casino.

The listed gambling concern has called off plans to give volunteers sledgehammers to knock down the fake multi-storey rock, much in the same way the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago. ”It’s got so much electrical wiring and so much gear inside it that it would have been a danger for people to smash up,” a clearly disappointed Star City spokesman, Peter Grimshaw, explained to CBD.

”We’re just going to leave it to the professionals,” he said. ”Safety comes first, I’m afraid.”

Read the full story here.

Work on public square in Hull will require demolition of eyesore flats.

A boarded-up block of flats that has been a magnet for vandalism is to be demolished as work begins on a new public square in Hull.

The buildings on Perry Street have been described as an eyesore by residents who said it has blighted the community.

The demolition on Monday will make way for a public square on Anlaby Road that will link to a new pedestrian entrance to the city’s KC Stadium.

Read the full story here.

Alabama councilors complain that legal process takes too long to demolish blighted properties.

City council members in Mobile, Aalabama are frustrated with new rules that make it more difficult to destroy blighted houses. For years, the city has demolished or repaired structures that are considered uninhabitable and a threat to public safety. But officials put the program on hiatus last year after a federal court ruling called into question whether the city was following the correct legal guidelines.

The new process is lengthier, which has upset City Councilman Fred Richardson. In a statement that will be welcomed by local demolition companies, he said the city needs to be more aggressive in dealing with blighted properties. “It’s taking too long,” Richardson said. “I’ve had some that have been up there for more than three years.”

Read the full story here.

$1 million grant awarded to owners of restaurant repeatedly hit by floods.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved a $1.17 repetitive flood claims grant for the demolition of the Riverside Inn in Ozark, Missouri. The owners of the restaurant will receive $996,014 for acquisition of the property, and the remaining $174,437 will cover asbestos abatement and other demolition costs. Fair market value of the property had been assessed at $322,000, and there is some question about how the acquisition amount was determined.

The historic Riverside Inn has stood in a flood plain for 86 years. It has flooded many times, but the flooding has become far more frequent. The restaurant flooded three times last year alone, which was finally what convinced the owners to ask the county to submit the grant proposal on their behalf. Since 2002, five floods have caused $742,291 in damages. The damage was covered by the National Flood Insurance Program.

Read more here.

Kentucky’s Executive Inn could be imploded in the next few weeks, according to reports.

The old Executive Inn Rivermont will be demolished in the next few weeks one way or another and we’re now hearing it could be torn down in spectacular fashion. City officials say the Executive Inn could be imploded in as little as two weeks.

Demolition crews are figuring out the best way to take down the main tower of the hotel and might be leaning toward implosion.

Read the full story here.

UK contractor claims to have doubled productivity with new twin-boom excavator.

Demolition contractors are renowned for their innovative approach to equipment use. But, even by those standards, the new twin-boom excavator in the Armac Group fleet is really pushing the envelope.

The company claims the machine was developed in response to the need for higher levels of productivity. “We carried out extensive time and motion studies and we realised that we were losing valuable productivity each time the machine had to slew to another location,” says Armac’s Adrian McLean. “So we approached Hitachi and worked with them to develop this new twin-boom arrangement.”

McLean reports that the new machine has almost doubled productivity levels although he says the development has not been without its problems. “One of the key issues we’ve had to address is making sure that the operators are good friends. The first pair we put on it hated each other and would slew each time their opposite number was about to start work. If anything, that probably halved our output,” McLean says. “In addition, the position of the twin cabs means that the operators are breathing exhaust fumes almost non-stop for the entire day. So we now have two operators that like each other enough to work side-by-side but who are expendable.”

McLean adds that the hydraulics of the machine have been downgraded to avoid what he describes as “the helicopter effect”. “During initial trials, we had a really big, powerful hydraulic pump driving the slew motion,” he says. “But during fast turns, the operators claimed that the machine would rise slightly above the ground, hover, and only settle when the slewing motion had ceased.”

Although he refuses to be drawn on the speculation, rumours suggest that Armac has a set of high reach front end equipment for this machine but has yet to find a set of neighboring tower blocks in need of demolition.

So isn’t McLean concerned about utilisation levels. “We looked into the utilisation levels very closely before making this financial commitment, and it’s true to say that the machine works so quickly that it is often stood idle waiting for the other supporting equipment to catch up,” he concludes. “But we have recently been approached by the Highways Agency who believe the machine is ideally suited to reinstatement work at T-junctions.”

Delays and vermin pile on the problems at 1515 building in West Palm Beach.

The building’s called 1515 but the name could just as easily be the number of problems facing the demolition crew.

Faced with city demands for $50 million insurance cover for imploding the 30-storey condominium, the demolition team have started to dismantle the building by slower, more conventional means. But, as WPTV reports, those methods are causing delays and a growing number of complaints from local residents.

According to neighbors, at 7 o’clock in the morning a breakfast truck rolls in, then the break truck, then the lunch truck. It’s nothing but noise and dirt they complain.

They also say they’ve seen rats.

Big ones says Ben Levy. “It looked the size of a large cat,” he says.

Wonder if it’s the same one the rest of the industry smelled when it saw that insurance clause?

Read the full story here.

Demolition News is well on its way to collecting the world’s strangest outfit.

Several months ago, I decided it might be quite amusing to wear a kilt at a music festival. Since then, I have been sent various items of clothing, so much so that I am now well on my way to the world’s strangest and least fashionable outfit.

To couple with the kilt, I now have a DemoBoys t-shirt, a pair of glow-in-the-dark yell SealSkinz gloves (more of those another time) and, thanks to those fine people at SCG Supplies, I am now also the proud owner of a very fetching (and almost incredibly warm) hat.

But winter is drawing ever closer and, while we still know no shame, we think it’s getting just a little too breezy for the kilt.

So if anyone would like to send us some equally badly-matched trousers, socks, boots or coats, we’ll be sure to model them right here.

Massacheusetts’ Uniroyal complex will fall for almost half estimated bid price.

Another day and another tale to add to the growing “US demolition bid pricing implosion” pile sat in the corner at Demolition News Towers.

Bids for the first demolition of decades-old, decaying and vacant industrial buildings in the former Uniroyal complex were opened Wednesday delighting city officials since the low bidders were well below the $1.2 million estimate. Mayor Michael Bissonnette said the low bids for the demolition of six buildings will allow the city to begin planning the next phase of demolition.

Community Development Director Carl F. Dietz said the apparent low bidder is McConnell Enterprises of Essex at $696,440. The next two other low bidders are Costello Dismantling of Middleborough at $876,000 and S and R Corporation of Lowell at $996,000.

“We are delighted to see these numbers for the demolition of the oldest buildings in the complex. We think the economy has a lot to do with it. We had 15 bidders and over 40 contractors take out bidding packages and take walk-throughs,” said Dietz.

Read the full story here.

New video from Dutch contractor shows exactly what ultra-high reach means.

High reach demolition excavators are notoriously hard to photograph. They’ve now grown so large that you almost need to be in the neighbouring county to get the whole machine in.

But this new video of Beelen Sloopwerken’s Cat 395 UHD machine nicely captures just how high a high reach machine actually is: