Demolition work exposes just how close buildings came to collapse.
Two of Christchurch’s biggest hotels have reached the final stages of demolition. The Hotel Grand Chancellor and the Crown Plaza are now just shells of their former structures, exposing the evidence of just how close they came to collapsing.
The Hotel Grand Chancellor, once one of the city’s tallest buildings, is a skeleton of its former five-star self with only eight of its 26 storeys remaining. It has been a complex job for the demolition teams who say the magnitude of the task was only revealed as it progressed.
“In the early days we could only see five to 10 percent of the building so we were making a lot of assumptions but as we stripped the building out and slowly pulled it to pieces we’ve seen the real damage and that’s been an ongoing process,” says CERA demolition manager Carl Devereux.
The demolition drew criticism in its early stages for taking too long to make any visible progress.
Devereux says now the building is back to its bare bones it reveals just how close floors came to collapsing. “It justifies everything we did when we had this whole precinct shut down until we had the propping and the stablising works in you can now see that was all required.”
Read more here.
