When you watch primates at the zoo, swinging from vine to vine, they look incredibly graceful, don’t they? You’d never guess, then, that when researchers x-ray older primates, they find a lot of signs of broken bones. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, whether you’re grabbing a vine that wasn’t as securely attached as you thought, or you’re putting the dynamite just a few yards to the left of where it goes. Here’s what can go wrong when the demolition team makes a whoopsy:
“I Barely Nudged It!”
Early in 2015, footage uploaded to Liveleak showed a demolition crew in China attempting to tear down an old seven story building when a small digger accidentally struck a supporting wall, sending the building crumbling down in plumes of dust and debris, and the workers scrambling for cover. The entire building came down in mere seconds. Buildings being torn down are usually in a dillapidated state to begin with, and sometimes the scariest mistakes happen before the explosives have even been planted.
The Leaning Tower of Russia
In late 2014, an illegally built 10 story tower in Sevastopol was set to go down with a controlled explosion. Knowing that people would gather around to see the building destroyed, public safety was top priority, and the demolition crew chose to use a weaker explosive charge than what would usually be recommended for the job. Unfortunately, the blast only knocked out enough of the structure to leave the tower looking a bit like a bendy-straw, tilted just a few degrees off center about half-way up. Footage uploaded to the Daily Mirror shows witnesses laughing as the building fails to come down.
House Survives Tornado… Then Gets Accidentally Destroyed By Wrecking Crew
Sometimes bad luck misses the first time, so it comes back to try again. That’s what happened earlier this year in Texas, when a woman whose home had miraculously been one of the few in her neighborhood to survive tornadoes last December came home to find the entire place torn down by a demolition company who had the wrong address. They were supposed to be tearing down a damaged house about a block away. She’s still waiting on the demolition company to help her out, and would rather not be pushed to pursuing legal action.
Whether we’re talking about misplaced explosives, not enough explosives, clerical errors or just nudging a building in the wrong way, there’s a lot that can go wrong on a demolition site.
