April 15, 2010

REC DEMOLITION

Three Caterpillar excavators were used on the Guild Inn demolition job — a 330 CAT High Reach excavator and a pair of CAT 345s.

FOCUS | Demolition & environmental engineering

Demolition of Toronto’s historic Guild Inn captured for YouTube

PETER KENTER

correspondent

When the newer hotel portion of Toronto’s historic Guild Inn complex was recently demolished, it garnered a lot of interest from locals.

“This time we decided to capture some of the demolition on camera, then put the video up on YouTube, to make it easy for them to see what was happening,” says Don Bremner, president of Restoration Environmental Contractors/REC Demolition with head office in Gormley, Ont. The action was captured by a Caterpillar rep, who wanted to highlight the prowess of three of the company’s excavators used on the job, a 330 CAT High Reach excavator and a pair of CAT 345s.

“It’s just an experiment at this point to see what we can do with the footage,” says Bremner. “It’s something that may be interesting to people who have an association with the building, but it’s also a promotional vehicle outlining our capabilities.”

The project itself was a publicly tendered contract with the City of Toronto, which owns the property. Bremner says his company came in as the low bid at $383,000, with about $100,000 in extra services added to the contract.

The site contains a number of historic buildings and eclectic architecture that made the Guild Inn a popular destination throughout the last century.

The object of the demolition contract was a six-storey, 100-room hotel that was built in 1965 alongside some of the original structures to accommodate additional visitors.

Ironically, one of the newest structures on the property was one of the first slated for demolition. The hotel was closed in 2001 and the city approved the demolition of the building in January 2009.

“We began the project by protecting the historic buildings on the site, some of which are 100 years old. The hotel was physically attached to one of the original low-rise buildings.

“The historic building itself had obviously been exposed to moisture inside and will need a complete refurbishment and restoration. We first needed to separate the newer hotel from the historic structure and block up the wall where it was attached.”

Egberts Engineering Limited provided the details of the separation and initial remediation plan, which also included waterproofing the adjacent historic structure and covering it with siding to protect it during the demolition.

The extra protection also spared the roof from the damping spray used by the contractor to mitigate demolition dust.

Bremner says that the abandoned hotel structure was typical of buildings constructed at the time, but water and weather damage occurring during the past decade made for an easier teardown.

“The Caterpillar 330 can reach up to 85 feet, so it was a fairly easy job,” says Bremner. “It was mainly concrete and rebar with some structural steel for support. Because it’s located in a park, there were a lot of people walking their dogs and coming by to watch when the weather was good, so we had to mind the spectators.”

While weather damage prevented the re-use of some of the building materials, most of the material from the project was recycled. Concrete from the building was crushed to specified size on site for later re-use on waterfront restoration and protection projects.

The entire project, from initial remediation to cleanup, took eight weeks, with the demolition portion spanning about three weeks.

Bremner says that more and more of the demolition projects his company handles are being captured on video.

“Initially, some of the projects were just being shot by interested parties, but a lot of the owners began to tell us that they’d like to have a record of the job,” he says. “On a recent job, we had video hooked into the Internet, so that the owner, who was in Quebec, could see the daily progress on the site.

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