Fire damaged property needed urgent attention
Initially, we received a ‘repeat business call’ about an emergency demolition project in Warrington from a valued client who had suffered an arson attack at one of his properties on Millingford Industrial Estate, Golborne and he needed a badly fire damaged property making safe and demolishing. We quickly attended site and took over the reins and we contacted key stakeholders like local Building Control, the Fire and Emergency services and the Utility companies in order to get the correct permits and permissions in place and to make sure that the structures were clear to dismantle, and we quickly had a 40 tonne demolition excavator on site, and with its specialist attachments and skilled operator we set to demolishing the dangerous fire-damaged structure.
The building in question formed part of Millingford Industrial Estate, which was originally known as Parkside Mill back in the late 1800s and it was clear that some of the original structures surrounding the fire damaged property has seen better days, so on top of the initial demolition remit the client asked us to come up with a proposal for demolishing a further 50,000ft2 of old semi-derelict mill structures and workshop buildings, including the dismantling of a tall brick mill chimney.
The plan was to undertake a ‘military- style’ operation during extremely short timescale; closing the road over the weekend and then assembling one of the largest mobile cranes in the UK to lift the bridge from its current position.
The initial plan was to protect the carriageway surface and lift the bridge into the road and then dismantle over
a nightshift and get the road back open, but this was cancelled due to high winds and so an alternative approach was developed to lift the bridge deck down onto a portion of waste ground adjacent to the carriageway, where we then had a little more time and ‘breathing – space’ to dismantle the steel structure into manageable pieces and removed all the materials from site.
Controlled dismantling of chimney
We made light work of demolishing the initial fire-damaged structure and our estimating team succeeded in winning the extra phase of the works, so we continued with the additional 50,000ft2 site clearance, which involved some initial asbestos removal; soft-stripping all remaining internal fixtures; fittings; chattels; lightweight partitions; ceilings; floor finishes; mechanical & electrical equipment cables; conduits and pipework, and all non-hazardous waste materials from throughout the buildings, so that the buildings were stripped back to their shells and ready for the ‘big-gun’ machinery to move in and raze the structures to the ground, including dismantling a 22m high brick chimney from the boiler house of the original Victorian mill.
The scheme presented us with a number of challenges… initially, it was the instability of the fire-damaged structure in close proximity to neighbouring property, then the task of dealing with 14 tonnes of hazardous asbestos material, plus 115 tonnes of general non-hazardous waste from within the buildings, then we had the added risk of working adjacent to a mainline railway less than 10m away at the closest point, and then safely dismantling the huge mill chimney, and all this on top of the usual risks and considerations required when working within a ‘live’ industrial estate with commercial business neighbours and residential neighbours not too far away.
All in all the works were completed over a 12-week period; on time and under budget as we managed to salvage over 200 tonnes of scrap metal, and we ended up recycling c.80,000 bricks, which we cleaned and palleted ready for sale back into the construction market, so all in all this old Victorian mill building will live on into the 21st century as the metal and brick will end up recycled into the products and buildings of the future. We also ‘grubbed-out’ all the concrete ground floor slabs and deep foundations and crushed all this material into usable aggregate, which generated nearly 10,000 tonnes of recycled hardcore, which was sold into the local construction industry, which made the overall scheme even more sustainable and ‘environmentally friendly’.
So, if you have an old in-efficient unused industrial building, which is draining your bank balance with a big commercial rates bill and you can envisage a clean open site ready for redevelopment, then as the song in the video suggests… “C’mon baby let Hardcore Crushing Ltd be your demolition man”
