November 22, 2011

Canadian demolition projects set world records

PETER KENTER

correspondent

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have been obsessed with records — biggest, tallest, and fastest. The world of implosions and explosive demolition is no exception.

The Guinness Book of World Records, for example, once certified the Aug. 16, 1998, demolition of 17 buildings comprising the Villa Panamericana and Las Orquideas public housing complex in San Juan, Puerto Rico as holding the world record for “the most buildings to be demolished simultaneously with explosives.”

Web veteran Implosion World maintains its own set of world records, which includes a large contingent of Canadian projects.

Two Canadian projects share its record for the “Most Structures Demolished at Once.”

A 1997 blast at the Stelco Steel Plant in Hamilton, Ont. featured the simultaneous demolition of 20 steel structures including smoke stacks, sheds and warehouses. The site notes that demolishing steel structures is more challenging than implosive demolition of reinforced concrete.

The site auditors rank the 20-building demolition of the Bow Valley Centre of the Calgary General Hospital in Calgary as an equal feat, slightly edging out the Hamilton project in difficulty, due to its urban locale.

The site notes that the 1998 demolition was delayed due to hot-air balloon observers violating local air-space restrictions during the project. An analysis of the event published in the January 2005 issue of the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association notes that the buildings covered a footprint of 84,000-square-metres and were demolished using 2,300 kilograms of explosives.

The demolition was engineered by celebrity demolition experts Eric J. Kelly and family who operate Advanced Explosives Demolition Inc., with headquarters in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The family recently appeared on television as the stars of the TLC reality series The Imploders.

The other Canadian record involves the April 2001 demolition of a 1,217-foot CBC transmission tower located in Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, Que., southwest of Quebec City. Holding the Implosion World record for the Tallest Explosively Demolished Structure, the demolition was carried out following the crash of a Cessna aircraft, which struck it during a thick fog and remained suspended at the top of the tower for several days. That successful demolition was another notch in the belt of Advanced Explosives Demolition and the travelling Kelly family.

Other records described on the site:

Largest Explosively Demolished Building
Sears Merchandise Center
2.7 million square feet
Philadelphia, Pa., 1994

Tallest Explosively Demolished Building
Hudson’s Department Store
26 floors, 439 feet
Detroit, Mich., 1998

Tallest Explosively Demolished Free-standing Structure
Matla Nuclear Power Station Smokestack
906 feet
Johannesburg, South Africa, 1982

Longest Explosively Demolished Structure
Interstate 80 Bridge, MP-177
2,680 feet
Boston Mills, Ohio, 2003

Oldest Item Explosively Demolished
The Great Buddhas of Bamiyan
Approximately 2,000 years old
Central Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan, 2001

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