Snow-bound video footage captures uncontrolled demolition in Manchester.
Regular readers will know that we have in the past been rather critical of some of the demolition techniques employed overseas, particularly in China and Canada.
But, just to prove that our pursuit of best-practice and safe demolition methods owes no national allegiance, here’s an example of poor practice from right here in the UK; Manchester to be precise.
And the defence that most of the building remains within the Herris fencing perimeter really is NO defence:
Here's what we could've wonThe news stream has been a little quiet today as we departed Demolition News Towers and headed for London and the Be2Awards in which we had been nominated for an award in recognition of our (questionable) achievements over the past couple of years.
As expected, we fell at the last, beaten into a distant second place by the unquestionably excellent The Construction Index. While we never honestly expected to win, we were of course disappointed; mainly because we never got to air our heartfelt and spontaneous acceptance speech.
So, rather than letting it go to waste, here’s what we might have said (if we’d won and if we’d actually bothered to write a speech):
“…I would like to thank the readers of DemolitionNews.com, without whom I wouldn’t be standing here today. Our website was designed in part to provide demolition professionals with a faster, more reliable source of relevant and timely information. And in the two and a bit years we have been in operation, we have more than achieved those aims, establishing DemolitionNews as the industry’s most widely read news resource.
Another key reason for starting the website was to prove a point. To prove that publishing, good journalism and audience interaction DOES NOT necessarily require the backing of a large publishing company. Rather, in today’s audience-led, web-based world, all that is required is consistently good content. Content attracts and retains readers; readers attract and retain advertisers; advertisers allow us to reinvest in content….everyone wins.
The fact that DemolitionNews is produced (literally) by one man and his dog (who you can often hear snoring in the background of our audio podcasts), I think, underlines that the stranglehold of the major publishers is being broken. Thanks to the Internet, readers now have direct access to news that is important to them and that hasn’t been filtered by an editor who may or (more often) may never have worked in the industry about which they now claim a degree of expertise.
DemolitionNews was the brainchild of myself and Institute of Demolition Engineers’ new president John Woodward. And what started as a throwaway conversation has blossomed into a news portal with an expending and incredibly loyal readership that spans the world in just a few short years.
I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved so far; we’re incredibly proud that our readers keep coming back and that they have voted for us; and you (and they) can rest assured that we’re not finished yet…”
Asbestos dumped on pavement during church demolition.
Construction Enquirer, the UK information portal that is fast becoming our preferred source of construction news, is reporting that a property developer has been fined after shocked safety inspectors found demolition rubble containing asbestos spilling out onto a pavement during work to knock-down an old church in Snodland, Kent.
HSE inspectors were acting on a tip-off from a worried member of the public who alerted them to the bodged demolition project.
Maidstone Magistrates’ Court heard the site was owned by Bernard Berry of Berry Estates Development Limited who were also carrying out the demolition of the building.
On 23 April 2010, two HSE inspectors attended the site and discovered the majority of the building had already been demolished but debris containing asbestos was blocking the pavement on one side and had also spilled out onto the pavement on the other side.
Video footage of wrecking ball tackling tower block demolition
Delaware Online brings us this video showing the demolition of the 11-storey Lincoln Towers building in Wilmington that began on Monday morning. The demolition is projected to take about three weeks to complete. Construction will begin on subsidized housing and a firehouse this summer.
Southend car park demolition provides good test for new addition to fleet.
The demolition of a multi-storey car park in Southend-on-Sea is providing a baptism of fire for Elvanite Recycling’s new Komatsu PC350HRD-8 high reach excavator.
Principal contractor Elvanite is working directly with Southend on Sea Borough Council on the site that is in the centre of the town, next door to Southend University. The structure is a split-level car park that has four levels at the front but goes to five levels at the rear, and which also has a lower ground (basement) level at the rear.
The company is demolishing the entire structure, recycling and reusing arisings in the next phase of the development programme. The first phase of development on the site will include a new Central Library, digital gallery, art studios for South Essex College, and teaching space for the University of Essex. In addition, a new public square will be created on the site.
Spearheading this development is the 22 metre high reach Komatsu machine that carries a three-section Komatsu demolition arm. The 48.5 tonne unit also features Komatsu’s unique roll-over cab, specifically developed for hydraulic excavators.
Demolition crew uncover homemade “bomb” prior to home demolition.
Demolition crews arriving to take down a Dade City house discovered a pack of fireworks neatly placed on a cardboard box top set on a stack of papers on the floor. A jar of some sort of fuel was next to it.
“Coming out of the fireworks was a green fuse,” said Dade City Police Capt. David Duff.
The fuse stretched from room to room connecting the same sort of explosive devices in five or six small rooms, he said. Police, the state Fire Marshal and the Tampa Bay Regional Bomb Squad were called and responded to the home at 38030 Church Ave. shortly after the devices were discovered at about 8 a.m.
The bomb squad worked for about two hours dissembling the incendiary devices. Meanwhile, yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the front of the property, but residents were asked to stay inside their homes rather than evacuate.
“Somebody was going to burn the house down,” said Police Chief Ray Velboom. “We just don’t know who.”
A Manchester pub facing demolition ahead of local regeneration causes us confusion.
Here is an object lesson in the need to read a whole article and NOT just the headlines.
A story just popped up on our news feed suggesting that Manchester’s Mark Addy pub – a riverside establishment famed for its food – was facing demolition in advance of local regeneration.
Now we saw the words Mark Addy and the mention of food and immediately assumed that the pub was named after or possibly owned by the rotund actor and national treasure from movies such as The Full Monty. Which just goes to show how little we know about North West of England history. For the pub was, in fact, named after named after a 19th century publican famed for rescuing over 50 people from drowning in the River Irwell.
Mayor Dave Bing fell well short of his ambitious goal of razing 3,000 vacant structures in 2010, tearing down 1,850.
Even so, Bing spokesman Dan Lijana said the city expects to reach the target of Bing’s federally funded $20 million demolition blitz — nicknamed “Bing 3000” — by March.
That’s one year after Bing made the promise in his State of the City speech and pledged to tear down 10,000 vacant homes by the end of his term in 2013.
“Mayor Bing’s commitment to take down 10,000 dangerous and vacant structures this term is iron-clad,” Lijana said in an e-mail. “Because this effort is more ambitious than any in the city’s history, it took time to develop the capacity and procedures to take down so many dangerous structures in such a short period of time.”
Of the 1,850 structures demolished last year, Wayne County tore down 460 houses.
Thirty-one demolition workers had to be evacuated from site after a fire broke out at the Moorgate Crossrail job last Monday.
According to Construction Enquirer, a demolition gang working for contractor J F Hunt had been soft-stripping 91-109 Moorgate when the alarm was raised.
Firefighters were called to put out the fire in the building, which is due to be demolished in several weeks.
Demolition company logo features Star of David being smashed by a hammer.
Here at DemolitionNews Towers, we have made an unconscious decision that all our stories follow the same basic rules as polite dinner party conversation: no sex, religion or politics. But we have just picked up a story from the Associated Press that forces us to break one of our own unwritten rules.
According to the story, the town of Jamel in Germany has been taken over by neo-Nazis. And one of the key reasons is the presence of Sven Krueger, a representative of the far-right German National Democratic Party who also runs a demolition company from home near the town, its logo featuring a man smashing a Star of David with a sledgehammer.
Officials say Krueger has been known to authorities for small-time criminal activity, but had stayed off the radar in recent years after turning to politics. That changed this a week ago, however, when Krueger was arrested on charges of receiving stolen property and weapons violations after a five-month investigation.
In a search of his home, authorities confiscated power tools they believe stolen and a submachine gun with 200 rounds of ammunition.
A few days before the arrest, a pit bull and a German Shepherd roamed the fenced yard of Krueger’s home in the middle of town, and an NPD poster with the pledge “we keep our word” hung from a blue industrial trash bin out front, filled with waste from his demolition work. A woman smoking a cigarette in the yard said she didn’t know where Krueger could be found.
His demolition company’s main building is about six miles (10 kilometers) away, and doubles as the regional NPD headquarters.
It is set behind a six-foot (two-meter) wooden fence topped with razor wire; a guard tower shines a floodlight at night, and dogs bark incessantly through the padlocked steel gate. The black-white-and-red German imperial flag used in the last years of the Kaiser flies overhead — a common neo-Nazi substitute for the outlawed swastika banner. Through the fence on an inside door the smashed Star of David logo can be seen.
The demolition of a multi-storey car park in Southend-on-Sea is providing a baptism of fire for Elvanite Recycling’s new Komatsu PC350HRD-8 high reach excavator.