Destruction!
August 12th 2004 -
Destruction!
A house a little down the road from us was demolished this morning. When we went outside to see what was causing the racket, we were blessed with the sight of a great big backhoe with a snapping-jaw shovel, attacking the house. It was in the front yard, and it was ripping into it: sometimes, shutting the jaw and just biffing the roof in, other times, grabbing a wall and pulling it inwards into the growing pile of rubble in the middle. A man stood next to the backhoe, ineffectually squirting water over the debris to stop dust from rising. Evidently, there had been a fire in the house some months before (we didn’t see the fire, but we heard about it). The fire hadn’t obviously damaged the outside, but we got to see the extent of the damage as the backhoe peeled back layers of the house.
First, my favorite moment was when it grasped the wall above the front door, roof already gone, and tossed it into the pile in the middle. Huge wall, tossed. This was superceded when the backhoe started driving onto the rubble of the front section, and carefully pulled the side walls in using it’s teeth. The next-door houses were right there… less than a metre separated them from the graceful destruction of their neighbour. And apart from a couple of loose boards landing in the yard, there was no collateral damage.
Both these moments, however, were superceded when the backhoe grabbed the water tank from the attic, squeezed it in its jaws, and used the torrents of water (the tank was quite enormous, much larger than a typical hot water tank, for example) to help out the poor guy spraying the debris. Then, dropping the still half-full tank, closing the jaw, and sucker-punching it, making it burst in two like a ripe melon. Both Anna (who has a strong destructive urge) and I instantly wanted to become demolition people, operating backhoes. Just awesome.
David C Says:
August 14th, 2004 at 12:40 pm
Did you see the interview in a recent New Scientist with the guy who specialised in destroying big buildings? Now there’s a hobby…
Andrew Says:
August 16th, 2004 at 3:38 pm
No – I’ve got a whole bunch of New Scientist magazines sitting in their plastic wrappers, waiting for me to get the time to read them. I love ‘em, I just don’t have the time at the moment.