UK demolition industry rocked by second unplanned collapse in a week.
The dust has barely settled in Reading after the major scaffold collapse last week; and already there has been another high profile incident, this time involving Cawarden Demolition and a former Co-op retail outlet in Nuneaton.
Emergency services were sent to Nuneaton town centre following the collapse of the former Co-op building at around 10.30 am this morning.
Nobody was injured in the incident. “There was nobody hurt. None of our people were, none of the members of the public were. No members of the public were walking past when it happened,” Cawarden Demolition managing director William Crooks told the Coventry Telegraph. Although he admitted that he didn’t want the building to collapse, he said that it is always a possibility and that Cawarden had put in place the correct safety procedures. “The scaffold has done its job, it has prevented it from coming right across the road. A lot of the scaffold is still up so it has definitely done its job. That’s what it is there for, in some ways it’s sacrificial even if we didn’t want it to happen.”
Speaking to DemolitionNews this evening, Crooks said he had arrived on site roughly 45 minutes after the incident occurred and has been there all day, helping the police and the HSE and fielding questions from the local and national media.
“We will carry out a full investigation of our own and we are working with the authorities to ascertain precisely what caused this collapse,” he concluded.
