Plans to replace terminal in just five years.

Bulgaria’s Sofia Airport is to demolish its old Terminal 1, seeking to construct a new terminal on the same location in five years, Sofia Airport CEO Veselin Peykov has announced.

Peykov has told the Bulgarian National Television that constructing a new terminal in the place of the old one would save money.

Noting that Terminal 1 has serviced tens of millions of passengers since it was opened in 1937, Peykov has explained that “times are different now” and a more modern terminal is necessary.

He revealed that the new terminal would have the capacity to service some 5 million passengers per year, or twice as many as the airport’s other existing terminal, Terminal 2.

The new terminal is expected to have 16 to 18 passenger boarding bridges and a parking lot consisting of several levels.

Read more here.

IBM Building Implodes to Make Way for New North Atlanta High.

A demolition team imploded one of the buildings at the former IBM campus on Northside Parkway to make room for the new North Atlanta High, which will be constructed on the site.

Around 7:45 a.m. on Saturday, Atlanta Demolition imploded one of two buildings at the former IBM Campus, located at 4111 Northside Parkway NE in Atlanta. The demolition of the Hillside Building will make way for the new North Atlanta High School, which will move from its current location at 2875 Northside Drive NW in Atlanta in August 2013.

The crowd began to trickle in at about 6 a.m. and grew to about 100 people by the time the explosives inside were ignited.

The new North Atlanta High School will accommodate 2,350 students.

After the Hillside Building is razed, the team will build the 105,000-square-foot Assembly Building, which will include a 600-seat auditorium, a 150-seat black box theater, a 2,100-seat competition gymnasium and a practice gymnasium. The other building on the former IBM campus, the Lakeside Building, will be converted into classrooms, offices, a library and a cafeteria.

Read more here or view the video below:

Work underway at quake-hit Christchurch building.

Demolition work is well underway at one of Christchurch’s most historic buildings – Cranmer Courts – undermined in the earthquake that devastated the city.

CityCenter appeals order that could delay demolition of Harmon tower

CityCenter has asked the Nevada Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that could delay demolition of the flawed Harmon hotel tower and a trial over defects in the structure.

CityCenter filed an emergency motion Thursday asking the court to overturn a July ruling by Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez that CityCenter couldn’t use extrapolation techniques to prove its claim the Harmon is riddled with defects and is unsafe.

CityCenter said its structural engineering expert, Gary Hart, evaluated 397 of the Harmon’s critical structural elements and found all but one defective. The elements selected included components of Hart’s choosing “based on their centrality to the whole building’s structural performance under gravity, wind and earthquake loads,” CityCenter attorneys said in the motion.

“He then used his 40-year expertise to infer (i.e. extrapolate) that another 1,072 related, untested structural components” were defective, the CityCenter motion said.

But, CityCenter complained, Gonzalez “has ruled that this extrapolation testimony is not admissible because the 397 test locations examined by Hart were not chosen by a process of random selection.”

The larger issue, CityCenter said, is that the issue of randomness and selecting what elements to test in buildings in defect cases is of “fundamental public importance with the potential of being repeated in future commercial construction defect cases.”

Read more here.

A follow on from our earlier post.

Since we posted our Comment piece a few hours ago, our Twitter feed has slowly filled up with references to the same story that originally emanated from the Health and Safety Executive’s press office and which has been reproduced in online publications and blogs across the Internet.

What is notable, however, is the way in which the tone of the story changes depending upon which publication you read.

The original HSE bulletin refers to the culprit as a construction company but never as a demolition contractor (although it does describe the location of the offence as a demolition site).

By the time this had made it through the editorial filter at Construction Enquirer, however, the construction company had become a demolition contractor. Similarly, Construction News saw fit to turn the construction company into a demolition firm in its headline.

Of course, with online publications seeking to beat each other to the news, this could just be an unfortunate coincidence. And yes, the reproduction of press releases often falls to a more junior member of the editorial staff who upon seeing reference to a demolition site might have justifiably made the mental leap to demolition contractor. Or maybe this is just an example of lazy journalism.

Yet the multitude of health and safety publications and blogs managed to maintain the reference to a construction company being at fault.

Weird that!

150 metre tall stack dropped in controlled explosion.

Explosives engineers have toppled a 150 metre high chimney at a power plant in Torun, in Kujawsko-Pomorskie Province.

Who is to blame when a client employs an unqualified contractor?

Here at Demolition News, we pride ourselves on knowing just about all the demolition companies in our native United Kingdom, particularly those in our own South London/Surrey area. So when I first read the reports of a Wimbledon demolition company having been prosecuted and fined for endangering the public and its own workers with unsafe demolition work, I was both surprised and intrigued.

It turns out that AA Construction (London) Ltd (the clue’s in the title people) is not, in fact a demolition company at all but a construction and cleaning contractor. It is no great surprise then to learn that the Health and Safety Executive was forced to investigate the company’s shortcomings when a local resident saw workers throwing chunks of asbestos from the roof onto a neighbouring road and footpath.

The HSE, as is its right, prosecuted the company, landing them with a fine for £36,000 and costs of just over £9,000.

All of which is only right and proper. But should that the end of it?

Surely an investigation is required to uncover just who thought it might be a good idea to get a cleaning company to carry out demolition work. They should be easy to spot as they probably have their teeth fixed by a local car mechanic.

The fact that this was probably (almost certainly) done to save cost should not exclude the client from further investigation and, quite possibly, prosecution.

Asbestos is a hazardous material, and – through a shortfall in its procurement systems – the client must surely be implicated in the exposure of local people and these construction workers.

Times remain tough out there, and there’s plenty of construction companies or gangs of unemployed men who would gladly “have a go” at demolition, often at risk to themselves and the general public.

Until the HSE prosecutes those responsible for employing these unregulated and unqualified gangs, this is a problem that will not go away.

Demolition firm sued over Bullards Fire

The man who shot a burning flare across the Yuba River and started the Bullards Bar Fire in the Sierra foothills was acting outside his employment with the Midwest Demolition Co., according to a representative of the Nebraska company sued by CalFire for $3.6 million in fire costs.

John Zapata, who is semi-retired from the demolition company that his daughter is president of, said the state fire agency developed the idea of two fires in 2010 at Bullards Bar when 1,307 acres burned after company foreman Christopher J. Martin shot the flare.

“They had to come up with this wild-ass two-fire theory,” Zapata said Tuesday. “It’s all about money.”

The double fires allows the state to sue Midwest Demolition, which the US Geological Survey contracted with to dismantle a gauging station about a mile downstream from the Bullards Bar Dam, Zapata said.

Read more here.

Painstaking demolition of 28 feet of wall becomes 150 foot collapse.

The contractor tasked with taking down a 28-foot piece of a pre-Civil War wall along the historic Kanawha Canal in Richmond, Virginia for a road project said the entire wall, including a piece on city property, inadvertently collapsed in the process, according to a statement from the company’s attorney.

“J.E. Liesfeld Contracting Inc. was to remove 28 lineal feet of brick from the existing wall. In the course of removing the 28 lineal feet of brick, apparently due to the age and condition of the wall, the entire wall collapsed,” says the statement issued by Bill Bayliss, an attorney with Williams Mullen who represents the Hanover County contractor.

Bayliss added that Liesfeld had been issued a city permit for the work.

“They were doing what they were supposed to do,” Bayliss said. “No one anticipated that the wall would collapse when they were doing this.”

However, Bayliss would not say who hired Liesfeld to perform the job.

Read more here.

Contractor treads carefully on site of former battery plant.

More than 100 years of history is coming down in Frankfort, Indiana. City officials said what was most recently the Exide Battery plant should be completely demolished by December.

However, demolishing a former battery factory, which once housed hazardous chemicals, is something done with extra precaution. Frankfort Building Inspector Sam Payne is monitoring the process.

“[The plant] had lead and acid, and such materials they made the batteries with,” Payne said. “[The workers] are washing down all the desks, sucking it all up, and decontaminating the whole building before taking it down.”

“A large 85-foot boom will go above some of those facilities and will provide a mist down upon them so that dust stays at an absolute minimum,” Frankfort Mayor Chris McBarnes said. “Barbed-wire fences are being put around the facility at this time to make sure no one can get into that area.”

Production stopped at the plant more than 20 years ago. Exide Battery decided to demolish the buildings.

Read more here, or view the local news video below: