As Tropical Storm Nestor Forms, New Orleans to Use Explosives to Topple 2 Cranes
With the storm moving through the Gulf of Mexico, the authorities were hurrying to bring down cranes at the site of the Hard Rock Hotel building collapse that killed three people.
ByDan Levin
Emergency crews in New Orleans on Friday were preparing to demolish two cranes that are teetering over a partially collapsed hotel project near the French Quarter, with fears that high winds from Tropical Storm Nestor could topple the cranes onto critical infrastructure and historic buildings.
To prepare for the emergency demolition, which is scheduled for Saturday afternoon and will include blow torches and explosives, the authorities widened an evacuation area around the site, where a Hard Rock Hotel under construction partially collapsed last weekend, killing three workers and injuring more than 20 people.
With Tropical Storm Nestor forming in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, city officials said they were racing to safely bring down the unstable cranes and stabilize ruined structures.
“Now it’s crunchtime,” the New Orleans fire chief, Tim McConnell, said during a news conference on Friday morning. “We’re moving as fast as possible,” he said, noting that the demolitions could safely occur within 15 minutes of the preparations being completed.
Since the hotel collapse, the cranes, which rise about 270 feet and 300 feet, have shifted, hindering recovery efforts. Only one of the three bodies has been removed from the site.
Engineers had initially hoped to demolish the cranes on Friday but delayed the operation to ensure safety. The forecast on Friday also offered some reprieve, with weather models suggesting that New Orleans would likely escape the brunt of Nestor, which was predicted to track further east. The National Hurricane Center warned that a dangerous storm surge and high winds could arrive along portions of the Florida Gulf Coast by Friday evening.
City and state leaders announced the audacious demolition plan on Thursday, leaving little time to bring down the unstable cranes safely and stabilize ruined structures.
“We have concerns about how the weather may impact the operation here and the stability of the two cranes,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said during a news conference on Thursday afternoon. “We are working as hard as we can on a timeline that will allow for the crane towers to actually be taken down safely.”
Chief McConnell of the Fire Department said on Thursday that crews would use small explosives to implode the damaged crane towers “in a methodical way in a specific location” so that they fall vertically into rubble and avoid hitting utility and electrical lines.
“Think of it like it melting,” he said.
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