Working in demolition is tough. The pay sucks. You’re constantly hauling garbage around. Every job is dangerous. And sometimes—sometimes—you accidentally tear down the wrong building.
This footage from a few years back shows a bridge in Bedfordshire, England getting demolished in less than 15 hours. Basically, a night’s work was all it took to vaporize a steel and concrete structure. It’s really neat to see the progression and to see all the machines working in tandem. It’s also just really damn…
Being an engineer isn’t usually associated with being a bad ass. In fact, it’s probably one of the gigs furthest from badassery! But here’s a job description that’s totally bad ass: you and your team go into combat zones and build or demolish things while people are shooting at you and looking to kill you. That’s a…
It is time to clear out some space in your Lego city, and the new sets in the City theme should do just the trick. Four new sets, launching March 1st, are returning construction workers (or in this case a demolition crew) back to the lineup after a 6 year hiatus. The new sets are up on the Lego shop-at-home page for…
How hard can it be to blow up a building? My childhood experience with knocking over waist-high towers of cardboard blocks leads me to say "not hard," but this botched job by a demolition team in Sevastopol suggests otherwise. I mean, come on guys.
With the shiny new span of the Bay Bridge complete, California is now in the throes of a second, parallel construction project—or deconstruction project, really. The old Bay Bridge span, some 58,000 tons of steel and 245,000 tons of concrete, must come down. This week, officials decided that some of the bridge's steel…
When the Commonwealth Games come to Glasgow this July, the city wants to put its best foot forward. The city thus has plans to blow up the Red Road flats, an infamous and now largely abandoned housing project, as part of its opening ceremony. A growing backlash, however, asks whether dynamiting the Red Road flats…
The years between 1880 and 1920 changed American cities completely: From elevators to air conditioning to electricity, the monumental buildings born during this period seemed like living things, humming with life. But as quickly as they rose, many of them were torn down—victims of the same progress that pushed them…
Most of us think of Germany as one of the most energy-progressive countries in the world. But in recent years, it's also increased its dependence on a form of energy that's anything but clean: coal. And it's demolishing or relocating entire towns to get at it.
It took more than 2,000 pounds of explosives to bring down this 32-story tower in Frankfurt yesterday—roughly the same amount as a Mark 84 bomb. Thankfully, since we live in the age of YouTube, there are plenty of astounding videos of the demo.
It’s been almost a month now since the brand new eastern span of the Bay Bridge officially opened for traffic—24 years and nearly $6.4 billion since 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed a section of the original. Now they stand side-by-side, but not for (too) long; a “construction and demolition” plan is underway…
Look, we all know how it is. You're at work, but your mind is somewhere else. It happens. You can't be too hard on yourself. Ideally your lack of attention wouldn't result in the wrongful demolition of two houses, but you're only human, right?
Out with the old, in with the new. Earlier this week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Florida Power & Light Co. demolished one of its power plants with 450 pounds of dynamite to make way for a cleaner and more eco-friendly plant that's slated to open in 2016. The Port Everglades plant had been in operation since the…
Demolishing a building is a big, messy pain in the neck. Dynamite is loud and dangerous. Wrecking balls are heavy and dangerous. Why not just get a robot to do the work?
We tend to think of demolition as destructive: dynamite, dust, and plenty of fireworks. But as a New York Times article recently described, demolition in dense cities is, more and more often, a "stealth" operation, where a building is dismantled over a number of weeks.
