House Demolition DIY Style ( Poss OT)

Suppose it depends on how fast the vehicle was travelling - bearing in mind the occupants all perished presumably quite swiftly, so it would have made quite a decent wrecking ball.

No doubt there will also have been a fair bit of damage in the aftermath too, extracting victims, vehicles etc - eg when you see pictures of vehicles which have been involved in motorway pile-ups, it's normally after the Fire Brigade have been and done their stuff with their Jaws of Life, so the vehicles are considerably more mangled than they were immediately after the crash itself.

David

One report I read suggested something like 80mph... a couple of tonnes of car and people at that speed is going to make quite a hole.

Looking at the picture it looks rather like there is not much left to hold up the near end of the roof ridge - so there could be a potential danger of the roof coming down and spreading the side wall out. One of the photos also showed some fairly serious full height cracks in the right flank wall.

The whole house was declared unsafe and demolished yesterday.

Unfortunately something similar happened close to where I live but not quite as bad. The car just missed the gas fire as it went through the wall into the lounge. Although the police were around for a while the real kick in the teeth happened later. After everything was made safe and boarded up the house was burgled. From what I've heard the family hadn't removed much stuff because they were always told it was unsafe!!

I did feel sorry for them. The road is used as a bit of a race track at times and they are right on the corner of a roundabout.

Take care, Ryan

Not the ones Ive seen

In fact the fire lot will only cut/open what they need to.

Mostly the recovery process consists in rolling what's left onto what was its wheels, and winching onto a truck.

Ive seen wahts aram raid did to our ocal shop- twice.

It now has a 'disability ramp' of solid concrete 4 ft deep added to its front!

I wonder whether they are able to rescue any personal stuff from the house, or if it is all considered too dangerous.

I was sitting in a Pub when a car gave it a good wallop,not from Criminals but an elderly woman who got her cars and pedals mixed up. Panicked and kept the accelerator in an Auto hard down. Although only traveling about 30 yards she managed to hit the wall hard enough that I was slightly injured. The cigarette machine flew off the wall and hit me. I knew they were supposed to be dangerous but not like that. As for the structure of houses it never fails to amaze me that huge sums are spent on locks,reinforced doors and frame, alarms etc when a couple of strong chaps equipped with decent sledge hammers and a crowbar can get a reasonable hole in a brick or block wall in minutes.

G.Harman

The factories and warehouses round here put crash barriers up after someone put a truck through the brick wall of one and made off with a truckload of stock

I had just started a team meeting -- most of my staff were in the room, but two were dialled in from home. Then, over the speaker phone, there's this long skidding sound, terminating in a crash and sound of broken glass. We all went quiet for a moment, not knowing which of the remote staff that came from. I'm thinking to myself that I didn't know anyone was dialled in from their car. Then I thought maybe it was someone's mobile ringtone? The silence was broken by one of the remote staff saying "Sorry chaps, got to go -- someone's just crashed into my car!". Anyway, when I got back to him afterwards, it turned out that he'd been dialled in from his front room, but heard the skid and looked out to see his parked car going past. He hadn't realised we heard it too. An elderly woman who visits one of his neighbours obviously got her brake and accelerator mixed up whilst parking. She shunted his car along the road, causing the skid sound as his handbrake managed to stop the rear wheels going round. His car then hit a builders van which was working at another neighbour. The builder said he was just sitting quietly in his van eating his sandwiches, when he heard a bang, looked up, and the houses were moving past, as he was being shunted along too.

Anyway, the little old woman looked as his car and offered him £50 to get the paint touched up. The fact that he couldn't open any of the doors beause the car was now shorter didn't seem to phase her. She also complained that his handbrake couldn't have been very good, in spite of the two black skid lines his tyres left down the road. She took weeks to report the accident to her insurers (actually I'm not sure she ever did). This caused his claim to take nearly a year, and her insurance eventually had to pay for nearly a year's car rental and then the write-off value of his car and a year's storage in a local garage.

Apparently, she still pulls up outside his house twice a week...

Never mind a timber framned plaster cottage ;-)

Let's face it, you can smash a window - especially in the first floor - WHERE THE REGULATIONS INSIST THAT A FIREMAN HAS TO BE ABLE TO GET IN OR A PERSON JUMP OUT

When my old house was done over, they just jemmied a window..glad that they did, cos they missed an unlocked door, which would have been something to explain to the insurance ;-)

Let's face it, half the double galsezd windows are held in with expanding foam anyway..

Alarms are worth it though.

They would have to be quite stupid chaps as it would be even quicker to break a window!

Not if the windows were all protected by steel shuttering.

The wagon that was used to get into the local factory had been rammed into the roller door first and failed to get through. That's when they went through the wall. Totally wrecked the door though.

On Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:16:15 +0000, a certain chimpanzee, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com randomly hit the keyboard and produced:

If it's hit the front corner with some force, it will have taken out the support for the lintel over the front window. It looks like the floor joists bore onto this wall too, so they will have come down when the wall did.

Thus spake snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk ( snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk) unto the assembled multitudes:

Someone came through the wall of my indoor bowling club last year. Same thing; in the car park, hit the wrong pedal, car came careering down a short grass incline and through the wall of the building (which is like one of the big sheds in a retail park, not brick). Knocked a bench seat onto the playing surface, hitting one of our players but not seriously.

Bloody lucky no-one was sitting on that bench seat, though.