As we’ve seen in the past, demolitions aren’t all about implosions. There are still many manual demolitions that are carried out by skilled excavator operators. The Victoria Street Bridge in Ontario, Canada is a recent example of that.
You may remember Priestly Demolition Inc. from a few other videos of theirs that we’ve shared in the past. They take a lot of time and effort to put together some exciting and informative videos of their demolition projects each year.
Priestly recently knocked down and cleaned up the 340 foot long, 62 foot wide Victoria Street Bridge in 20 hours, which was amazingly 9 hours ahead of schedule. The road was closed on 5am on a Saturday morning and opened by 1am on Sunday. A total of 10 excavators were used, in tandem, to strategically rip art the structure.
Over 3,300 tons of debris was removed from the site, which required about 300 truck loads over the 20 hours. I’m always amazed by the coordination of these demolitions. There are so many moving parts and the trucking schedule is so important to staying on schedule. Priestly is no stranger to performing these types of demolitions, but this is the first one I’ve seen of theirs where there are excavators working on top the bridge and on the sides at the same time, at least for part of the job.
Check out the video of the demolition below!
Demolitions by implosion seems like the easiest way to knock down a structure, but there is so much preparation that goes into it that even the slightest mistake can have a huge impact. When smokestacks are demolished correctly, it can be a thing of beauty, like when these two silos in Scotland hit each other midair or when this asbestos filled stack was precisely demolished to fall into a pool of water. Things didn’t go so smoothly for demolition crews in Denmark last week, however.