I spent the last week driving down the A635 every morning and thinking that something was missing
or
http://g.co/maps/bhx3wThe tower on the left is now missing.
So what is so new about using cables to pull buildings down? I thought it had been done before.
Are you confusing planned demolition of a building using wires with what your apprentices can do when they decide the wires just need a really
*big* tug to get them through?
I suspect that the demolition was a test and not because of safety considerations of the structure of the building. The safety considerations are the newts and the canal banking. The newts are not that important but the canal could flood the national grid switch station that is located in the power station grounds if the banks gave way.
Bloody hell! I don't suppose that they were as close as they looked but it certainly looked a bit hairy.
Tim
Perhaps not on that scale. I do recall the bus I was on in Glasgow being stopped by a construction worker while their bulldozer drove across the road, pulling a cable wrapped around an old tenement building. The building came down, the bulldozer backed up, a couple of blokes swept up the odd bricks that had bounced into the road and the traffic got going again. Health and safety 1960s style.
Colin Bignell
Like this factory in Tyneside in 2007?
I wasn't there and don't know exactly how it was done but it certainly looks like something was heaving like mad to pull the whole structure backwards. There was only about 30 seconds between it starting to move in the second picture and the big cloud of dust at the end.
There are apparently sound reasons why this one was done first and they are nothing to do with flooding from failure of the canal bank or death to newts :)
The bank collapsing has been quoted for years but is probably a load of tosh. The river, not the canal is closest to the station, the canal being much further away, but significantly there is a huge flood bank at least 6m above the normal river level, so demolish when there are normal river flows and the risk of bank collapse is minimal. The three chimneys (2 @ 500ft for the coal and one @ 350ft for the Gas Turbines) were brought down near simultaneously on Sunday 14th February 1999 with zero impact on the bank structure.
Now for why this cooling tower was felled first! Cracks were discovered in these cooling towers in the late 70's (see pics at the link below) For a number of years during operation of the station the towers at this site had an exclusion area imposed around them during high winds - this was based on the footprint of the debris from when the Ferrybridge C cooling towers collapsed in the mid 1960's
All of the towers bar one were gradually repaired and strengthened. This extended to cracks being grouted in the main structure, a kevlar wrapping around the top and additional supports in the opening at the base. That particular tower, the furthest south west, was repaired for cracks but the base support work and the kevlar wrapping wasn't started before the station was closed in the early 1990's and the exclusion zone remained until the end.
The repair process and typical cracks
The cheesewire method?
BTW the plumbers on site had not even noticed it was missing:-) How hard is it to spot a missing cooling tower when you are working that close to it (cannot say how close at it would show where I was working).
And to cap it off one of the plumbers insisted there were ony 4 left. I did point out the 5th was hidden behind the others.
Did they say "you did that" when challenged? :-)))))
drag the thousands of tonnes of masonry to the ground around 7am and the majority of Barnby Dun residents slept through it."
They dragged it to the ground? Got their own gravity generator, have they?
Not as close as they looked, thanks to tele fore-shortening.
Happy now?
Sometimes I drive past my old home in Blackpool; just to see what a f*ck up the buyer has made of it. I see empty spaces everywhere and have problems remembering what used to be there.
Hi, the bank near to Thorpe Marsh did collape in the late 1940's - it was found a layer of peat existed under the flood banking and it was strengthened after this, so no risks to the banking. As far as I know there aren't any newts on site, just grass snakes which delayed the initial pulldown.
The rope pull-down was indeed a test and the demolition contractors now have to get planning permission from DMBC to demolish the other five - expected to be in 2013.
Well worth a read for those inteterested IMHO.
:Blushes: yep it's at the bottom - the initial reports on the internet on Google Books somewhere. I stumbled on it when doing the article. I've also added the info on 2C from here today, never noticed it all those times I've been in - good job it wasn't too windy. I've have noticed however, that some of that Kevlar work is coming out on some of the other towers (1B is quite noticable!). Any ideas who's doing the monument up?
You're right about newts too - there are some in the "PFA pond" Smooth, palmate and great crested (pp126 of
That's funny. A lot of it was still there in the 70s.
MBQ
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