Demolition ooops

[Adam Aglionby]

Obviously roofing grade concrete

[Andy Dingley]

strongly constructed. Must be one of the few buildings where you could tip it on its side without it immediately self-dismantling under gravity.

One does wonder though just WTF the demolition engineer thought he was doing with such asymmetry though?

[Andrew Gabriel]

I was searching for one I recall in London -- think it was this one

morning, full page ads in many of the daily papers, with a super cool bloke standing in the foreground smoking a cigar, with the half demolished leaning building in the background, and the slogan "Happyness is a cigar called Hamlet". You had to admire the speed that Hamlet and their advertising agency got that into print.

Hamlet produced some wonderful adverts in their day, such as:

[Clot]

[geoff]

Leonard rossiter and the cinzano ad anyone ?

[Clot]

You b%gg$r. I almost sprayed the monitor with a red alcoholic liquid from S.A.!

[The Medway Handyman]

[Andrew Gabriel]

If you've got 10 minutes to spare, someone's put them all together.

Leonard rossiter and the cinzano ad anyone ?

are fantastic. Same advertising agency.

[Pete Zahut]

As you say, they are fantastic. My favourites at the moment are the "Comparethemeerkat.com" ones.

[ARWadsworth]

I have only been to one demolition. That also did not go as planned.

was well worth going to see.

Adam

[Tim Downie]

Just out of interest, why are flour mills so strongly constructed? Presumably all that strength costs money and isn't done without good reason.

Tim

[Reentrant]

and flour in an air-cannon, but non-dairy-creamer was even better.

[Jules]

construction's interesting; very strong frame and walls, but the roof is obviously designed as a weak point so that any explosion will be diverted upwards. (I've seen similar intentional weak points inside places that handle explosives - but I suspect a lot of folk don't realise that grain dust in a confined space can be quite potent)

[Adrian C]

Mmm. Non-dairy creamer :-)

I had a job once restocking vending machines, and scoffing spoons of that when one was looking. They may have noticed my weight ballooning though...

Are vending machines designed sufficiently to contain / avoid powder related explosions?

[PeterC]

and coal dust - don't need firelighters.

I was forced in to asking a manufacturer a daft question about fine dust: we were looking at using a substance that was about 5nm, so finer than flour etc. The elfinsafty bods demanded and answer on risk of explosion. In vain I tried to explain that fumed silica had done the burning bit and its bigger form was in buckets around the factory specially for putting out fires.

[Dave Liquorice]

idea from?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Ah, this...

thought went through my mind. It's a different agency, but London was the world leader in advertising during this period (and that's one of the most successful ads ever, both as intended for Levi's, and unintended for boxers:-).

I didn't recall the 1968 Hamlet advert -- was living in the US then. Strangely, I did recall the 1966 music teacher one, which must have been shown later on too.

[Jules]

explosion, which was somewhat on local turf - and I happened to be down in St. Paul for the last few days, so hopped over to Minneapolis and took a wander around the mill museum which is on the Washburn site now.

Fantastic museum, anyway - and they do a nice little demo of a dust explosion using a model mill, 'dust' (I suspect it was regular houshold flour), and an ignition source.

One interesting snippet of info was that a lot of these big explosions aren't caused just by dust naturally circulating in the air. That often only creates a small fire / flash, but results in caked dust being dislodged from equiment, vents etc. - and it's that which provides the fuel for the main event (hence such sites not only have to be kept free of dust in the air, but equipment has to be constantly cleaned to avoid any build-up of material)

cheers

Jules