Michigan motorcycle shop may close after demolition next door causes subsidence.

A Bay City business could be relocating in the coming weeks after a neighboring building’s demolition caused walls to buckle and subside.

Bill Smith, owner of Competition Enterprises, was told to leave his motorcycle shop due to damage done to a common wall between his shop and an unoccupied building at 1610 Broadway Street.

Now, Smith could be searching for a new location, as a city inspector had the business shutter its doors and leave about $100,000 worth of merchandise behind.

View the video here.

Brandenburg is low bidder but Bierlein gets the contract.

The city of Parchment and River Reach Partners LLC, which is planning to redevelop a vacant paper-mill property in the city, are hoping for state approval of the company they have chosen for the first round of demolition of mill buildings.

Bierlein Companies Inc., of Midland, among the largest demolition companies in the United States, is the choice of the city and developer from five bidders who sought the long-anticipated city project. Bierlein’s bid of $1,345,000 to take down Mill No. 1 along Riverview Drive between First Community Federal Credit Union to the south and Island Avenue to the north was the second-lowest of the five bids.

Brandenburg Industrial Service Co., of Chicago, came in with a lower bid, but the city and developer gave their support to Bierlein because it is a Michigan company and for the way it addressed such things as pricing of individual components of the project.

Read the full story here.

Cape Times takes simplistic approach to Athlone Tower implosion explanation.

Predicting the rate and direction of a just-imploded falling structure is notoriously difficult. In fact, until the advent of computer simulation software from the likes of Applied Science International (ASI), it was something of a black art, known to only a handful of experts who passed their knowledge down through the generations.

South Africa’s Cape Times newspaper apparently doesn’t have access to the high tech ASI software; nor was it able to call upon the incisive and experienced mind of a lifelong blaster. So, in order to explain the technical issues facing the demolition engineers charged with felling the Athlone Towers on 22 August, it resorted to that tried and tested simulation method of large photo and red marker pen.

It will be interesting to see just how closely the descent of the two towers matches the low-tech predicted path.

Workers and locals hurt as demolition of Quezon City shanties resumes

Eight people were hurt on Thursday as a demolition team tried, for the second day, to clear a 7,000-square meter lot at the corner of Broadway Avenue and 7th Street in Barangay Marianas, Quezon City in the Philippines.

Several pillbox explosions occurred as residents stood their ground behind a makeshift barricade to protect their shanties, according to Superintendent Edgardo Pamittan, commander of the Quezon City Police District (QCPD) Station 11.

“Intermittent pillbox explosions in the area resulted in the injury of six laborers and two members of the Special Weapons and Tactics team,” Pamittan said.

Read more here.

Thieves get more than they bargained for with 20 tonnes of deadly asbestos.

A trailer carrying 20 tonnes of asbestos has been stolen from a Willshee’s Waste Management, in Glensyl Way, Burton. Now an alert has gone out urging anyone who spots it to call in expert disposal teams.

A spokesman for Burton police said: “We are advising people that if they do see a large quantity of material dumped anywhere not to go near it, but to contact the Environment Agency as a matter of urgency.”
The raid happened when thieves drove up to the firm’s depot in a white Scania lorry tractor and hooked up the distinctive green trailer laden with its toxic cargo.

Dean Willshee, director of Willshee’s skip hire, said: “It was loaded with asbestos from numerous sites, ready to be disposed of. “It’s not just a few sheets – it’s a colossal amount. If drilled the dust from it can be dangerous. I think they nicked it not knowing what was in the back of the trailer. I think they are going to have a bit of a shock when they come to dispose of it.”

Mr Willshee said the thieves were captured on CCTV trying to steal the trailer and had spent about 30 minutes carrying out the raid.

Read more here.

Video footage charts progress of works to pave way for London’s Crossrail project.

We were there the night the final curtain came down at London’s famous Astoria music venue and now, 18 months later, we can bring you a high-speed, time-lapse video showing the demolition of the Astoria and the neighbouring 157-167 Charing Cross Road.

The video below, which comes courtesy of London Underground, was shot by the Centre Point cam.

The demolition work both here and at the Goslett Yard site, undertaken by McGee Group, is now complete. Now that the ground has been cleared, construction of a temporary EDF substation is underway on the Astoria site.

Read more here.

Presence of stray cats delays demolition works.

Neighbours of an abandoned Florida condo building said the Wednesday demolition was postponed due to cats living inside the facility.

Danielle Crocker, who led the effort to delay the demolition of the South Beach building, said she and other volunteers contacted the building’s owner, TD Bank, and contractor ASC Inc., but they did not make any headway until Miami-Dade County got involved in the situation, WPLG-TV, Miami, reported Wednesday.

“The property is supposed to contact us if there are living animals inside. They never did,” said officer Levare Baker of Miami-Dade Animal Services.

Read the full story here.

Mounting refurbishment costs force developer to consider explosive options.

Implosion is on the table for what’s left of the Evansville Executive Inn. The city is talking with a couple of different demolition companies about bringing down the building if that’s the way the new hotel project heads.

Browning Investments was supposed to refurbish the remaining half of the old Executive Inn and turn it into a new hotel. But the company found fixing it up was too expensive and is giving the hotel back to the city.
Browning is recommending the old building be demolished and a new hotel altogether built.

Arena project manager John Kish said the city is looking at multiple options for bringing the Exec down.
“Just as when we demolished the first half of the Exec there is an idea of using a collapsing method – implosion – as well as traditional swinging the ball and knocking it over,” he said. The first half came down this winter using that traditional method. The major difference between now and then – the skeleton of the arena is now largely in place.

“When they took down the original tower, they had a 100-foot safety radius around it,” Kish said. “It was ten stories tall. This is eight stories tall, and the arena is about 90 feet away. So, we do think there’s any extraordinary risk involved.”

Read more and watch a video report here.

US contractor Champions our cause.

For more than a quarter of a century I have been engaged as a business-to-business journalist on a variety of national and international construction and demolition magazines. And there were times in that 25 year period when I got the very distinct impression that I was talking to myself. Each month, we would send out our printed magazines to tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who each greeted the publication over which I had sweated blood and tears with a simple “meh!”.

Which is just one of the many reasons that we chose to put DemolitionNews.com onto the Internet. No publication is complete without an engagement and interaction with its readership, and we have been delighted with the level (and quality) of the comments we have received both here and on our Forum sister site.

But occasionally, just occasionally, we receive notice of an even greater engagement with our audience; and it is these occasions that make this job worth getting out of bed for.

Monitoring our site traffic, as we do with an almost religious fervour, we noticed a spike in traffic emanating from the blog of Terrence O’Rourke at US contractor Champion Environmental Services, Inc. Now Terry is a good friend to us here at DemolitionNews.com and has provided us with some very useful insights over the past few years. But we were intrigued why we were suddenly receiving so many hits directly from his site. So we checked it out, and this is a taster of what we found:

“…Mark Anthony of “Demolition News” has become an invaluable resource concerning an exhaustive number of issues related to the demolition and environmental industry. His insights span the European landscape then pierce across the Atlantic with empirical precession.

While I have yet to meet Mark Anthony in person, our evolving friendship echoes an epistolary tradition visa via the advantages of technology, namely, the Internet….”

For the sake of modesty, you can read the rest of what the ever-eloquent Terry has to say by clicking here.

But, in closing, many thanks for your kind words Terry; and to everyone else, please keep those comments – both negative and positive – coming.

Are unforeseen extras just that, or are they a reaction to the economic climate.

It’s strange how the demolition industry is subject to its own fashions and trends. A few trendsetters buy themselves a high reach excavator, and before you know it, they’re the industry’s must-have accessory.

The fashion trend for the past year or more has been one of low bid prices. With demolition contractors across the US and Europe struggling to keep men and machines gainfully employed, bid prices have got lower and lower to the point that, in many areas, they now need to look up to see a snake’s belly. Indeed, during the past 18 months or so, we have typed the term “low bid” so many times that our PCs have now taken to filling in the blanks as soon as we type the letters L and O in quick succession.

But, like all fashions, low bids’ place in the spotlight has been relatively fleeting. And while large swathes of the industry are still wearing last season’s cut-price colours, there are those among us who appear determined to set a new trend – Demolition Extras.

For the uninitiated, this is not some kind of designer accessory; nor is it an offshoot of the Ricky Gervais comedy TV series.

These demolition extras are those unforeseen yet oddly predictable bills that land on a client’s desk during or just after a demolition project. The reasons for these extras are numerous – almost too numerous to mention – but can range from the obvious undisclosed asbestos to the slightly more esoteric contaminated corn. But, whatever the reason, these extras seem to surprise everyone except the demolition contractor issuing the invoice.

So, in an age when clients are expected (and, in some areas, legally obliged) to disclose precisely what the unsuspecting demolition contractor is letting himself in for, are these a legitimate additional cost? Do they highlight the ignorance of clients and their project managers? Or are they a sign of something a little more sinister? Are demolition contractors attempting to offset the demand for low bids by bidding cheap to win the work and then ramping up the extras to achieve something approaching a profit?

Certainly, demolition contractors are constantly required to make changes to their plans; clients are often ignorant of the techniques and processes that will be employed which can cause confusion further down the construction chain; and asbestos (and bats, shrews, lizards and a multitude of other protected species) does have a nasty habit of hiding itself away only to leap out when it’s least expected. But when these extras can raise the cost of demolition from an agreed $7.366 million to $15.3 million, something’s not quite right.

Have Your Say: We’d love to get your take on the subject of unforeseen extras so please hop over to our Forum area and let us have your thoughts.