Man’s body found at former asphalt plant.
A 59-year-old Mississippi man was pronounced dead at the scene after falling from a catwalk at a demolition site three miles north of Detroit Lakes on Saturday.
Becker County sheriff’s deputies were contacted by the man’s wife Saturday night after her husband didn’t check in with her that evening as he usually did.
Deputies found the man’s body at the site where he’d been working: a former asphalt plant that was being disassembled. According to a press release, the victim “had apparently … fallen from a catwalk of a substantial height.”
Read more here.
Our thanks to the guys at Hy-Safe Technology for bringing this one to our attention.
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.
Up to half of all country’s residential properties in need of demolition & rebuilding.
Chinese officials announced recently that they estimate up to half of the country’s existing residential structures will need to be demolished and rebuilt in the next 20 years in part because of poor quality building work – but also because many of the buildings were built without planning permission.
China annually sees more construction than any other country. In recent years, the nation has had up to 2 billion square metres of development annually. Each year, China uses 40 percent of the world’s cement and steel, the main ingredients of the construction industry.
But both experts and industry watchers have questioned the rapid speed of demolition and reconstruction, criticising poor building practices and a lack of consistent urban planning, along with a blind pursuit of economic gain on the part of developers.
In April, Qiu Baoxing, vice-minister of the ministry, said during an industry forum that Chinese buildings can only stand for between 25 and 30 years. In contrast, the average life expectancy of a building in Britain is 132 years and they last around 74 years in the United States.
Read more here.
Undiscovered asbestos to balloon costs.
The cost of the Quincy Fair Mall demolition project could more than double after even more asbestos was found in the building.
It was thought last week the material was contained to only one section of a hidden floor that had asbestos tiling. But the city was informed this week that it’s more widespread, pushing the demolition several months behind schedule into the fall.
“It’s turned out to be about as bad as it can be,” said Dennis Harrington, Quincy’s planning director. “Not from a public health standpoint, but from a cost standpoint. It turned out there are lots of hidden floors with asbestos material.”
The situation is expected to balloon the project cost from $500,000 to about $1.1 million, Harrington said. That said, the added expense won’t come out at city taxpayers’ expense, and instead will be paid with surplus federal stimulus funds.
The state department of environmental protection has determined asbestos is all around the building, making it more difficult, delicate and costly to get rid of the materials. Nonetheless, officials stress that the asbestos is not a public health threat because it hasn’t been disturbed and become airborne.
“They don’t know how much flooring is false, because this building is partially demolished and they can no longer send people to walk around in there (due to asbestos),” Harrington said. “They’ve decided to assume it all has to come out.”
Read more here.
Oshkosh company set to sue for additional works at water treatment plant.
In the latest example of the demolition extras trend, Miron Construction Co. and the city of Oshkosh could be headed to civil court over the cost of a revision to a water treatment plant demolition contract.
In an Aug. 2 claim filed with the city, Miron’s attorneys said the city owes the company $340,318 for having to re-stabilize ground equipment, perform additional excavation and remove an underground, concrete retaining wall at the water treatment plant. Engineers and city staff did not discover the wall until September 2009, more than a year after Miron began work demolishing the old water tower and other structures at the city water treatment plant.
The city and the project engineer, CH2M Hill, have said Miron is only entitled to an additional $26,034 — the cost to remove the retaining wall.
In its claim, Miron said CH2M Hill instructed its crews to begin removing the retaining wall immediately, promising that cost adjustments would be dealt with later. CH2M Hill said it would recommend the city charge Miron for any project delays if Miron did not promptly proceed with work.
When Miron submitted a $340,318 bill that included the cost of ground stabilization and additional excavation on Dec. 16, CH2M rejected it and recommended the city only increase the payout by the amount it cost to remove the wall, $26,034. In its claim, Miron states it has tried to settle the dispute with the city in earnest since December, but said the city has refused to offer any more than the $26,034 CH2M recommended.
Read more here.
C&D Consultancy’s main man is top of the league.
Although Manchester United are still to play, the first weekend of our Demolition Fantasy Premier League is all but over. The points have been checked and verified. And we can exclusively reveal that C&D Consultancy’s John Woodward is currently in pole position with an impressive 65 points.
Woodward’s early season success is doubly remarkable. His team contains no real big name players; and it has three players from his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers, surely contenders for relegation by this time next year!!
To make things even more frustrating for those of us competing with John “Shankly” Woodward is the fact that he was actually texting and tweeting about his success whilst at the Wolves v Stoke game with Genesis’ Arne Marx on Saturday.
We would like to say that this is merely an early season blip and that the cream will rise to the top but, having seen the cream of my own beloved West Ham sink to the bottom for most of the past 20 years, we’re already adjusting our expectations and praying for mid-table mediocrity.
And it’s not too late for you to join the league. Just click here for more details on how to create and register your team.
Contaminated corn just one of a number of issues
Demolishing the former Sinclair meatpacking plant now is expected to cost $15.3 million, a sum that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is slated to pay in its entirety.
This week, the City Council is amending the demolition contract between the city and local demolition contractor D.W. Zinser Co. of Walford, increasing the existing contract of $7.366 million to the $15.3-million figure. The initial part of contract was for the initial phase of the demolition.
FEMA agreed to pay for the demolition after it concluded that the city-owned plant, parts of which the city had been leasing out to small businesses at the time of the June 2008 flood, posed an “imminent threat” to public health and safety because of flood damage and two post-flood fires.
In recent days, Greg Eyerly, the city’s flood-recovery director, noted that moldy corn that had been stored at the former packinghouse was going to add a bit to the demolition expense, an addition on Monday that he estimated would be $150,000.
Read more here.
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.
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.
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.
