Tunnel Vision
Date Posted: January 15, 2019
Posted In: Ideas, Projects,
From Construction & Demolition Recycling: Unique demolition projects often require innovate approaches to overcome on-the-job obstacles. One such project was the demolition of an industrial freezer at Butterball’s Mount Olive, North Carolina, facility.
This 95-foot tall, 26,000-square-foot processing freezer use to be instrumental to the company’s operations. However, over the years, it became inefficient to continue to operate. Although the freezer was being phased out of operation, it continued to be cooled to below freezing, costing Butterball $14,000 a month in utilities. It was also a substantial waste of space that the company and its operators had to contend with. The issue for Butterball in having the freezer removed was that it was located near the center of the plant with critical operations surrounding it and no viable access points for demolition crews.
Butterball initially consulted with ARCO Construction, St. Louis, to find a solution for removal. After preliminary plans failed to provide a viable demolition option, ARCO brought in the team from Hayden Wrecking, Washington Park, Illinois, to help craft a tailor-made approach formulated for the specific challenges of the job.
Devising a plan
Difficult demolition projects are nothing new to Hayden Wrecking. The 40-person company, which was founded as Hayden Lumber & Wrecking by William R. Hayden 73 years ago, specializes in industrial and commercial demolition work where precision is paramount.
“We do a lot of very difficult and surgical dismantling work inside of chemical plants and oil refineries. Also, as our concrete cutting and coring division grows, we are doing a lot of this as well,” Ben Hayden, who is Hayden Wrecking’s third-generation owner along with brothers Nick and Brian, as well as the company’s VP of operations, says.
Familiar with the company’s expertise from prior jobs, ARCO reached out to Hayden to develop a plan, with the project being awarded in November 2016.
“They brought us in early on in the process to discuss a safe and efficient way to complete the project. One of our dismantling managers, Lloyd Copeland, worked with ARCO’s team to develop a plan and pricing that everyone was comfortable with. Since this structure was built completely surrounded by structures added at later times, there was no direct access to the freezer without going through structures and buildings that were to remain in place. Lloyd and our team developed a plan to temporarily remove components of the buildings that were to remain so we could access our work, and ARCO developed a plan to reconstruct these components when demolition was complete.”
Hayden says that the planning process was a labor-intensive one, with executive staff making site visits and keeping in close contact with personnel from ARCO and Butterball to understand the scope of work required and devise a strategy with sufficient complexity for the obstacles at hand.
According to Hayden, it was this top-level support and collaboration on the front end that aided in laying the groundwork for a successful project.
“The amount of prep, planning and design almost took longer than it took for us to dismantle and clean up our structure,” Hayden says.