On the way to work today I drove past a crew demolishing a building (a 2-story brick apartment house, FTR). While the backhoe was tearing down the walls, a couple of guys on the ground were, get this, spraying the building with a hose. This wasn’t a city fire crew, mind you; it was a couple of regular guys using an ordinary garden hose hooked up to an ordinary water spigot.
WTF??? What benefit is there in hosing down a building when you’re demolishing it? I note that there wasn’t any sign of a fire (not to mention that if there was a fire, a city fire crew would have been on it in a heartbeat). I also note that it wasn’t a particularly hot day today.
Anybody in the demolition business want to explain this to me?
Yep, dust control is right on the money. Knocking down a building can generate HUGE quantities of airborne dust which is not only annoying but also a potential health hazard. Especially since many older buildings (and even some newer ones) have asbestos in their construction.
One would like to think a house would have been checked for asbestos, and if any is found, it would be remediated (removed) before the house was demolished.
Of course, if this was such a small-scale operation that they were using a garden hose instead of a water truck, they might not have bothered.
According to my environmental engineer, all friable asbestos must be removed from a structure prior to demolition. Non-friable asbestos can be left in place, but is generally kept wet during demolition. National emission standards actually require that there are NO emissions (whether asbestos or not) from a building under demolition. I’m not sure how the rules apply when a building is taken down using explosives, since there is always that big plume when it happens.