Saturday, October 17, 2009

Demolition Through The Ages

By Matthew G Smyth

The demolition of buildings has become almost an art. In the early days it, experts were only required for the deconstruction part, but full blown demolition could be done by anybody. However, nowadays when health and safety requirements are at a high and more and more buildings are popping up all around, choosing the right experts to demolish a given building is an important step in tearing down and starting anew.

Since skyscrapers made their first arrival around a century ago, buildings have been appearing in more and more locations and it is understandable that there is a fair bit of taking down to do. In time, the demolition crews of old began to develop expertise and skill and so demolition experts were born. In the early days, every demolition process was carried out entirely with manual tools! Even buildings with ten or more floors were all taken apart with hand held tools and it took a very long time indeed.

Today, however, there are some amazing pieces of equipment that have been invented for the sole purpose of demolition of a building, and they cut down the time originally taken for demolition by more than half! One of the most popular pieces of machinery in the genre is the rotational hydraulic shears. This piece of machinery has made several old technologies obsolete, and is even used in mining. Other methods such as flame cutting and silenced rock breakers are also in regular use, and depending on the assignment at hand, different equipments can be brought in.

Here's a bit of demolition trivia " the tallest building to ever be demolished was in New York City. It was the Singer Building, built in 1908 and torn down in 1968. It was 47 stories tall!

There are a lot of innovations happening in the field of demolition, and the process is only going to get smoother and faster with time!

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