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TAMPA – Struck on the beams, the old Bromley office building looked as awesome as bones of fish on a plate.
But the 5-story structure proved Sunday that he still had a surprising amount of combat left.
A demolition crew had planned to weaken the structure by making strategic cuts in its steel support beams, and then using four powerful shovels to pull it with steel cables. The building had to collapse, card house style, in about 30 seconds.
Instead, the job should take most of the day.
From Sunday morning, the diggers teamed up several times as wild dogs trying to drop a water buffalo. Their caterpillars looked like tanks and turned the first roadway, then dug deeper furrows into an old car park. The building swayed slightly – think of trying to roll a car in the mud or pushing on a vending machine – but the harmonic movement never reached a tipping point.
Instead, the heavy excavators themselves were often inclined forward by the mass and inertia of the building, and finally three of the four cables were broken.
"Old tired building that just does not want to give up," said Bill Martin, a veteran construction executive who was not working on the project, but went out to watch. "It shows how much they built them in the 1970s."
Along the way, the workers tried to deepen or make additional strategic cuts in the building support beams. They discovered that previous cuts did not necessarily reduce the structure as much as expected. Torches cut steel but also melt steel, so some cuts were essentially wound back, not as strong as an intact beam, but enough to make demolition more difficult.
Teams from Barr & Barr, the general contractor, and Cross Environmental Services, the demolition contractor, consulted with engineers, planned to order more cables and make cuts in the side support beams of the building to further weaken the structure before again.
"We are going to get this building today," said Fred Hames, executive vice president of Barr & Barr and director of southeastern operations. "It's Murphy's Law in Construction … The key is to stick to that and make sure no one gets hurt."
A similar process had been used near an old building in what is now Walter's Crossing Mall, and the method, known as the Trigger of the Building, is not unusual. for a structure the size of the Bromley building.
Once demolished, the former office building is expected to produce approximately 24,000 pounds of crushed and re-used concrete at the Midtown Tampa project site of $ 500 million on 22 acres near the southeastern corner of Highway 275 and N Dale Mabry.
New York-based Bromley companies plan to begin construction in early 2019 on what will be 1.8 million square feet of construction, including:
• A Crescent Communities apartment complex of 390 units.
• A 48,000 square foot Whole Foods market is expected to open in the fall of 2020.
• 750,000 square feet of Class A office space, plus two boutique hotels and over 200,000 square feet of retail, restaurants, entertainment, fitness and full-service businesses air.
But on Sunday, the building's demolition work attracted Juanita Craft, 24, who took classes to become a medical assistant when Sanford-Brown College occupied the building.
"I was driving the other day, and I saw it and said," Wait, what? " She says. "I did not know that something was happening, it's very strange to see him now."
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Contact > Richard Danielson> to [email protected] or (813) 226-3403. Follow @Danielson_Times
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