Demolition contractor Keltbray has explained how it demolished the bunker bay, boiler house and two huge towers at the Ferrybridge power station in West Yorkshire.
The project, which took place in summer last year, involved demolishing all three elements of the power station at once because covid restrictions would have involved evacuating too many residents during the pandemic.
Using explosives to demolish all of the buildings at once rather than taking them down piece by piece involved a complex operation, but meant that only 187 houses had to be evacuated.
The demolition involved using linear-shaped charges in the boiler house, which contained 40,000 tonnes of steelwork, to keep the main columns of the building intact up to the point of detonation.
Meanwhile, to stop the 9,000t chimneys from ‘telescoping’ on detonation, Keltbray designed reinforced concrete hinges at their bases to ensure that the base would rotate over and collapse in the way the contractor intended.
Keltbray’s video also contains spectacular footage of the explosions themselves (from 3:33 onwards in the video).
