Anglian on fire with OilQuick
After being called to the sunny seaside town of Great Yarmouth to react to a recent fire in the town centre, Anglian Demolition & Asbestos were tasked with the delicate operation of assisting the fire Services in making the site safe whilst protecting the public at large from the dangerous fire damaged structure and surrounding buildings which now stand less than comfortably between the main pedestrianised shopping route and residential housing to the rear. In addition, access in and around the site was never designed with a flow of large emergency response or construction vehicles driving in and out in mind.
The building, originally constructed mainly in brick, concrete and steel, had housed a busy bowling alley and indoor market stalls prior to the blaze. Anglian Demolition hoarded off around the entire site and created access for demolition and contractor vehicles to the quieter portion of the site on a junction at the rear of the site away from the main shopping street. It was necessary to completely close the one way road between the houses and damaged building to extend the site internally, so now with road access created inside the site this is being utilised as the only form of vehicular access in and out of the site.
As any demolition contractor will acknowledge space on sites is not always at a premium, especially in city or town centres, so an alternative way of getting as few as machines as possible onto a site has to be well thought out in advance.
Anglian Demolition Managing Director Lee Storer explained to ECY Haulmark that the OilQuick system had really come into its own on this project. Having initially installed the system onto two of their Hyundai 220LC excavators some eighteen months earlier, Lee Explained “with the space so tight on this site, we could only safely allow one excavator working on here, also the forensic team are still here working after the fire, so a lot of extra consideration which would not apply on a typical demolition site create further complexities to how we get this building demolished quickly and safely for all concerned in the area”.
Lee added “The solution was to bring one of our Hyundai 220LC along with an assortment of attachments, all of which can be changed in seconds having the OilQuick couplers installed. We need to change between the attachments fairly regularly to accommodate the cutting of the steel beams, dismantling of the concrete and brick walls and clearing the rubble into wagons, so having three attachments such as the steel shear, selector grab and bucket all fitted with the OilQuick coupler meant our operator could react to any given situation quickly and safely”. This machine is typically making up to ten attachment changes a day alone. It has been calculated on this site that two hours per day are being saved by the operator not having to perform manual attachment changes. Which overall will see the contract completing three weeks earlier than originally planned.
Anglian Demolition also claim that having the OilQuick fitted to their machines now ensures their operators are working safer and are always equipped with the right tool for the job, which eliminates possible attachment abuse and costly hydraulic hose repair bills etc.