Power plant implosion ends in building still standing

There were a few red faces in Portland last week when what was meant to be the state's largest ever implosion didn't work out as planned.

As you can hear in the video, the countdown wasn't done correctly and the implosion seemed to happen too early. Once the dust had settled the pile of rubble you'd usually expect to see wasn't there. It looks as though not enough explosives were used, or the charges were placed poorly as the building remained standing.

The building is actually a Central Heat Plant including two 230-foot smoke stacks. The stacks came down, but the main structure only fell 18-feet and was left swaying in the wind.

Who's fault was this? Engineered Products Co. was hired for the job, but the operations manager, Jennifer Gregor, is blaming Precision Explosives of New York who were hired to carry out the explosives work. An investigation is sure to follow and Gregor has stated a plan for taking the building down completely will be ready by next week.

Source: The Wrecking Ball

Egyptian demolition worker dices with death during building demolition

I'm not sure what the health and safety regulations are like in Egypt, but this is certainly no way to demolish what looks to be the concrete shell of a 5-storey building.

Rather than use explosives, or get the right equipment to demolish the building from top to bottom, one man and a machine decide to take out its supporting pillars. As you can imagine, if you break the pillars closest to the machine, the building is going to fall in that direction.

As for the machine operator, we see him jumping out of the machine as the building collapses and then at around the 19 second mark someone appears from the dust cloud. Is it the operator? We hope so, but can't be sure he managed to escape.

Lorry used to pull down tower ends with crushed car

Trying to save a bit of money on a demolition job should not mean cutting corners. It will usually end in disaster and all kinds of health & safety red flags. The video above is a perfect example of this.

Instead of getting the right equipment to demolish the concrete tower, the company carrying out the work decided to weaken the tower at its base and then pull it over using a lorry and a chain.

The idea that the tower would fall in the direction it was being pulled was an optimistic one, and ultimately it didn't turn out that way. The tower clearly decided it wanted a soft landing and aimed for the blue car instead to cushion the blow.

What you may also notice is a guy standing behind the lorry watching the tower fall. We have to question his intelligence seeing as he is directly in the path of the tower if it had fallen as intended.