Wellbar house
Thompson's have just completed the demolition of Wellbar house; Wellbar House was located in the heart of Newcastle city centre on the doorstep of the city's beloved St James Park.
The building was 15 storeys high and was originally built in 1960's as the local tax office; the building was a concrete frame structure with a concrete panel in fill.
The first procedure of the demolition process was to remove the asbestos and completely soft strip all 15 floors. At the same time we erected a scaffold that totally enclosed the structure allowing us to work externally at each floor level. Monaflex sheeting was attached to the scaffold, encapsulating the entire building, which helped to prevent dust spreading out into the local environment.
We also began to demolish the concrete plant room on the roof. This was demolished using hand held tools as the roof was unable to take the weight of any of our plant due to its structural design. Once the plant room had been demolished an opening was created within the roof which allowed us to crane up the required demolition plant directly to the 15th floor. The demolition plant included 4 mini diggers and 3 skid steer bobcats and their fuel
Before the crane lift could take place we appointed a structural engineer to calculate the loads that could be safely deployed on each floor. The structural engineer also had to prove that it was safe for us to locate the 100 tonne crane in the position needed for the lift to take place in relation to the nearby tunnel for the underground metro line.
Once all the plant was lifted into place the demolition work commenced, floor by floor. The work was carried out using a combination of muncher and pecker attachments fitted to the mini diggers, with all demolition arisings being removed from each floor via the lift shaft, using the skid steer bobcats. All materials where then removed off site in 8 wheel tipper wagons to our recycling centre for processing.
Once ten floors had been removed from the structure, the scaffold was completely dismantled. This allowed the final 5 floors to be demolished using our long reach excavator, which speeded up the demolition process and enabled us to meet the overall contract programme of 19 weeks.
The final part of the contract was to breakout and remove the reinforced concrete foundations bases. As we had expected, this proved to be quite a task, the bases were substantial due to the structure of the building they had been designed to support. Once the bases were removed all the remaining concrete piles were surveyed, this information was passed on to the clients structural engineers for incorporation into the design of any proposed structure on the site.
