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.

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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.

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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…”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Sacramento cancels contract over bogus bond from demolition company.

The city of Sacramento has terminated two contracts with a water meter installer officials and workers accuse of disappearing with tens of thousands of dollars in federal stimulus money.

The city canceled the contracts this week after a bonding company said a bond submitted by Advantage Demolition and Engineering was counterfeit.

The company won contracts from the city worth $3.4 million to install hundreds of water meters.

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London’s Earls Court exhibition centre could be demolished according to Guardian reports.

Earls Court is one of London’s largest and oldest entertainment venues, and it will host volleyball matches at the 2012 London Olympics. But its rich and varied history could come to an end following the games, with new owners planning to demolish the venue to make way for a housing project.

The Earls Court exhibition centre and Olympia, a further multi-purpose venue also in west London, were bought by Capital and Counties – a subsidiary of the FTSE 100-listed property company Liberty International – earlier this month.

The company has revealed plans to bulldoze the Earls Court complex, which covers around 26 acres, and integrate it into a huge residential area that will straddle the two London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham.

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Payroll clerk given five years for theft while demolition company owner was critically ill.

A payroll clerk was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison and ordered to repay $367,454 to the Fresno company from which she stole while the owner was in critical condition in the hospital.

Nora Arambula, 38, never said she was sorry for stealing from Kroeker Inc., a family-run demolition and recycling service on Chestnut Avenue south of Highway 99, Kroeker family members said.

Her theft led to nine employees being laid off, and it forced the company to borrow money to stay in business, family spokesman Jeff Kroeker told Judge Jon Nick Kapetan in Fresno County Superior Court.

Read the full story here.