There are a few ways to demolish a building or structure, including the tipping method or good old American explosive firepower (Insert Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor grunt here). Sometimes you just have to strap some dynamite to a building to get the job done and that’s exactly what crews in Detroit did to dispose of the 81 year old Park Avenue Hotel.
The Park Avenue Hotel was a 13 story, 252 room structure built in 1924 by architect Louis Kamper and closed in 2003. In its last days, it served as a rehab center for the Salvation Army, but had to be closed due to rising costs. Unfortunately, the building was looted by scrappers and hit by vandals soon after it’s close, according to HistoricDetroit.org, making it yet another eyesore for the downtrodden city of Detroit.
To demo the building, crews used approximately 200 pounds of dynamite.
The former site of the Park Avenue Hotel will now house the Detroit Red Wing’s new Hockey Arena, which will cost roughly $450 million and is scheduled to be completed before the 2017 NHL season opening.
Below is the demolition video shot by TheGadgetGuy1 with his DJI Phantom 2 Drone:
For some reason, there are plenty of people out there willing to try their hand at the “hard hat challenge,” in which worker’s attempt to launch a hard hat onto their head by stomping on a shovel, a 2x4, or any other launching mechanism. It all seems like fun and games until the wrong side of that hard hat ends up hitting you on top of the head, which seems to happen EVERY TIME.
Sometimes the way to do something doesn’t have to be the toughest way. Slipping overboots on over your work boots seems less like “slipping” and more like “jamming” and “forcing” some times.
Kids say the darndest things…so much so that there was a whole TV show made about it. Kids never really quite understand exactly what adults do for a living, so it’s really fun to hear about the little things they pick up on and then watch them try to put the pieces together.
As we have highlighted before on Construction Junkie, China has shown us what a model for efficiency is when it comes to large infrastructure projects. That being said, they seem to be creating a lot of one-off, gargantuan pieces of equipment to do so. In the video below, we see the Sanyuan Bridge in Beijing get entirely removed and replaced with a new bridge in 43 hours.
The most terrifying thing on a job site is when workers get creative with heavy machinery. Sometimes it works out and nobody thinks anything of it, but, if they’re not extremely careful, chaos can’t break loose.
Just in time for Halloween, here’s a video of a bunch of dirty rats living below a concrete slab in Brazil that a group of lucky contractors had the pleasure of uncovering. As the crew broke up piece after piece of concrete, more and more rats scurried out in a hurry, much like that scene in the movie Ratatouille, when hundreds of rats fell out of the ceiling. At least those were animated.
A bridge needs to be built, so time to bust out the cranes, right? Not so fast, a Chinese company has built a machine that has a creative way of setting girders into place.
Lifts may seem relatively safe, because they move fairly slow, but, believe it or not, there are actually very good reasons that OSHA safety procedures exist, especially wearing a harness on a lift.
There are many classic pranks that construction workers pull on the new guy on the site, such as being sent to find a left handed hammer or a light bulb repair kit, but this one might just be the most tiring.
Building implosions are always fun to watch, although sometimes they just don't go quite right. So when companies can accurately control a demolition and have two structures hit in mid-air, it's a thing of beauty! The Cockenzie power station in Scotland has two 487 foot tall chimneys and when it came time to demolish them, there was no better way then to have them strike mid-collapse.