Documents reveal $2.3 million of demolition contracts awarded without public bidding.

The Baltimore Development Corporation, the city’s quasi-public development arm, over the past year and a half awarded six contracts totaling $2.3 million to demolish buildings without publicly advertising the work, documents have revealed.

According to The Baltimore Sun, each of the six contracts was worth more than $25,000, the amount that is supposed to trigger public notice when work is requested by city agencies. Instead, the BDC asked companies for their prices, and, in the case of two contracts – including one for $1.5 million – did not award the work to the firm offering the lowest price.

This is a continuation of a story that we first covered here. Further details of the latest revelations can be found here.

Check out this video of a seven storey structure implosion in Rio de Janeiro.

It’s always great when we receive notifications of new video content. But somehow it’s even more exciting if it comes from a part of the world that we haven’t covered previously.

So we’re very excited to bring you this brand new video all the way from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, courtesy of reader Fabio Pinto and Fabio Bruno Construcoes. Not only is this from a suitably far-flung location, it also provides a great behind-the-scenes look at the charging of the building prior to implosion.

Many thanks for sending this over Fabio.

Another on, off and on again demolition story has happy outcome for the contractor.

Cleveland has scored a legal victory in its delayed effort to tear down the old Howard Johnson Motor Inn building, City Council members announced this afternoon.

In a statement, Councilwoman Shari Cloud, said: “I am thrilled that the court has finally decided to allow the city to move forward with the demolition of the Howard Johnson building, which has been a community eyesore for years,” Cloud said. “The building had stood vacant for a long time and caused a perpetual safety issue. We can now move forward and clear the way for positive development.”

Read the full story here.

1941 implosion of North Tower of London’s Crystal Palace as part of British war effort.

Our thanks to Robert Kullinski for drawing or attention to this.

Exclusive first glimpse of trailer for new demolition TV series.

Eric and Lisa Kelly, the people behind Advanced Explosive Demolition, are to be featured in a new TV series that looks at both their life and their work as demolition professionals.

And we have just been directed to this exclusive video trailer:

Nebraska announces availability of demolition grant funding.

Applications for the Western Nebraska Housing Opportunities Demolition grant funds are now available at the offices of Twin Cities Development and the City of Scottsbluff Planning and Building offices.

According to Rawnda Pierce, director of TCD, the first round of applications will be accepted through Oct. 23. All applications will be ranked and scored to determine the applicant’s eligibility. If there are additional funds available following the first round, Pierce said, a second round of funding awards will run from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15.

Pierce said about $350,000 will be available and that a portion of the total grant will be used for the demolition of the Hergert Milling structure on Avenue B and the old City Limits Motel on East Overland.

Read the full story here.

Demolition triumphs are quickly forgotten, but mistakes live on in infamy.

This morning, along with the usual offers of Viagra and penis enlargements, my email inbox contained a message that filled my heart with a mix of dread and loathing. The reason for my fear was due to the fact that the message was marked “Demolition Fail” and I knew, without even opening the accompanying video attachment, that it was the latest example of the Turkish building performing a forward roll that we featured on Demolition News some months ago.

Now I have just checked my deleted items and I can tell you that I have been sent the same piece of video (or links to it) no less than 37 times. I have also just done a quick recap of my Twitter feed and I find that this same video has been picked up by my search engine more than 100 times. And on YouTube, one version of the same video has been viewed more than 120,000 times.

You see, in the days of print media, a story of this type generally lasted about as long as that edition of the newspaper: Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper, as the UK adage would have it.

But in the world of digital media, just about everything we do is added to the constantly-evolving cyberspace landscape and will remain there long after we’ve all hung up our hard hats and safety boots.

Which is why I firmly believe that demolition contractors need to think twice before speaking to or involving the non-trade press in any way, shape or form?

Want to know why? Let me give you some examples.

We recently followed the run-up to the implosion of a chimney in Leicestershire here in the UK. The opportunity to “press the button” had been auctioned off to raise money for charity, the local newspapers and radio and TV channels had been informed, and – seemingly best of all – one of the presenters from the TV programme Top Gear was expected to be on hand.

Come the appointed hour when the button was pressed and, thanks apparently to some faulty detonators, nothing happened.

Now to the average “blaster”, such an eventuality was not entirely without precedent, which is why the contractor in question had a high reach excavator on hand to subsequently push the chimney over.

However, to the national press, this was news indeed. Not only did the chimney fail to fall but the Top Gear presenter had failed to show up as well. As a result, the contractor in question – a highly professional and well-trained outfit – made perhaps their one and only appearance in a national newspaper linked forever to a job that had gone a little awry.

But there’s worse. Let’s try a little role-play.

Imagine you had overseen the explosive demolition of a bridge that had sent a foot long shard of copper shrapnel through the roof of a nearby house, and several houses have had windows broken by flying debris, even though they had apparently been assured that they were in a safe zone.

At this point, a local news reporter sticks a microphone under your nose and asks: “Well, how do you think it went?” What do you say?
a. “No comment”
b. “We’re still assessing things and will be able to provide you with a full statement just as soon as our investigations are complete.”
c. “I think we hit a home run here. I am tickled to death.”

If you answered a, the chances are that you have been watching too many TV movies and believe that the term “no comment” will be construed as a declaration of innocence.

If you answered b, you’ve probably had some media training and have just afforded yourself some thinking time in which to address the concerns and complaints of local residents whilst preparing a formal statement.

If you answered c, you should almost certainly have all your media liaison privileges revoked with immediate effect, regardless of your position within your company or your stature in the industry.

Sounds like a joke, right? Well, in truth, I have written this, in part, for comedic effect. But the fact is that this is based upon a real event and real quotes from a contract in Pittsburgh earlier this year. And here we are, five months later, and those quotes live on.

And, sadly, it is not just the single contractor that is tarnished with this but the entire demolition industry.

In the UK, the National Federation of Demolition Contractors now requires each of its members to have a site audited for best practice as a prerequisite of membership, and the Institute of Demolition Engineers offers a formal qualification for its members. In the US, the National Demolition Association runs its Demolition Academy sessions, again to promote best practice. And even the European Demolition Association, traditionally a forum for cross-border politics, has attempted to lobby the European Parliament to promote the cause of demolition professionalism.

Yet all that can be undermined in an instant.

Demolition, particularly explosive demolition, may be an art but it is an imprecise science. An unforeseen defect in a structure’s composition CAN result in debris flying further than calculations and previous experience might suggest; a change in wind direction CAN deposit plumes of dust in precisely the area we were trying to avoid.

How you handle such eventualities on the day and, moreover, how you handle them with the press will dictate whether you’re seen as a king for a day or a fool for a lifetime.

Demolition of former middle school attracts copper and metal thieves.

In the original version of the story, they came bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh. But in the modern retelling, they came to Bethlehem looking not to deliver but to remove.

According to the Bethlehem Area News, the demolition and stripping of the old Broughal Middle School in Bethlehem has attracted a slew of copper and other metal thieves, according to police.

Piles of copper piping and mounds of wire have been stolen, police said, in the few days the school has been under demolition. Several hundred pounds of copper is missing from the site, police said.

Latest installment in our series of “the press knows nothing” series.

It’s less than 24 hours since I ranted on about the general ignorance of the press and its refusal to understand the demolition business. And already, we have another example of just how little they know about what constitutes professional demolition.

We reported last week on the implosion of the Mountain Bell building in Phoenix. And here is a part of the report on the resulting clean-up operation as written by azcentral.com:

The explosive demolition earlier this week of the 10-story building at Third Street and Earll Drive went off as planned. The building came down, a plume of dust went up and debris showered some homes in the neighborhood.

Now, just to be clear, a plume of dust is an unfortunate and largely unavoidable side-effect of an implosion. But debris showered onto neighbouring homes is a serious mistake, and not an example of demolition going “as planned”.

The rest of the story can be found here.

The demolition of Houston’s Savoy Hotel is back on again; and Cherry got picked!

It’s a saga that has taken more twists and turns than the worst daytime soap opera; but the demolition of part of the Savoy Hotel in Houston is finally reaching its denouement.

You may recall that the crumbling edifice of the older part of the structure had been earmarked for demolition, with Cherry Demolition being the low bidder at a price of $448,000. However, this met with objections from the building’s owner, who preferred to appoint a contractor of is own choosing and negotiate his own price direct.

And word reaches us that Cherry Demolition has manged to retain the contract for an as-yet undisclosed sum.

More details can be found here.