Demolition Project -- Tuesday's Gone

It was the last Tuesday the old Tuesday Club building in downtown
Sacramento was going to see. The four-story building, which had served for years as a place for state legislators, staff and lobbyists to meet after (and sometimes during) work, had to be demolished to make way for the expansion of the Sutter Medical Center across the street in the California state capitol.

The structure’s 11,000-square-foot footprint was being replaced by a new medical office building, part of Sutter’s $385 million, contiguous campus expansion plan.

The Tuesday Club, part of the 147-year-old Ebner hotel building, had four stories, was of wood stick construction and contained a 30-foot high first floor that housed a theater/meeting room with a raised stage, wood floor and balcony seating.

A basement lounge area had a tunnel connecting it with a separate street entrance, "like something you would see in a movie about the Chicago Mob," says Rodd Palin, president, Two Rivers Demolition, Sacramento.

Two Rivers won the demolition bid for $70,850. Of course, with that old of a building, asbestos abatement was needed. Allied Environmental removed all the plaster from the interior walls.

"After the asbestos abatement was completed, what remained was primarily wood, except for the built up roofing and some concrete," says Palin. "We decided to remove the roofing by hand, then grind as much of the building as possible."

Things are never that easy, of course. Just a few feet from the Tuesday Club was an historic Catholic church with stained glass windows imported from Rome and insured for $5 million. "We were charged with the responsibility of providing protection for these windows and assurances to the church personnel to satisfy them that all necessary precautions were being taken to prevent any damage to the windows," says Palin. Two Rivers installed scaffolding with wood attached as a barrier along the entire church wall, and screwed plywood to the outside window frames to protect the precious glass.

The next problem was what to do with the waste generated by the project. Two Rivers does not own a landfill and wanted to avoid that option as much as possible.

The original bid estimate provided for 52 high-side end-dump loads of building debris to be sent to Sacramento County’s Kiefer Road landfill. But a commitment was received in advance from Wheelabrator Industries’ cogeneration plant in Martell, Calif., to take in ground wood chips for $8 per bone-dry ton FOB.

The chips, sized to 3 inches, were processed by a Peterson Pacific 3400 horizontal wood grinder. "After grinding and selling the wood, we sent only five loads to the landfill," says Palin.

The 314 tons of wood sent to Wheelabrator had a relatively high level of moisture content, 21.39 percent, probably because of dust control measures. Two Rivers only received credit for 247 bone-dry tons.

But according to Wheelabrator, it generates approximately one megawatt-hour of electricity for each bone-dry ton of material burned. One megawatt-hour of electricity is enough energy to power the average 2850-square-foot home for one month. Hence, the old Tuesday Club could have provided enough energy to power 247 homes for one month, or 7,513 homes for one Tuesday or any other day of the week.

The demolition work was performed by a variety of equipment, including a Caterpillar 330 Excavator with thumb and bucket; Case 9050 excavator with grapple; Hyundai 320-lc-3 excavator with thumb; Case 85XT skid steer; and a Caterpillar 973 track loader with Peterson demolition bucket.

Other materials recovered at the site included 84 tons of metals sent to Schnitzer Steel in Rancho Cordova, Calif., and more than 1,000 tons of concrete and masonry that were crushed onsite to a specified product size by a Pegson 428 track-mounted impact crusher and used as backfill material.

"The diversion of 314 gross tons of soft debris and 84 tons of metal saved us $15,468 in trucking and landfill disposal fees," says Palin. That was 22 percent of the entire contract amount.

The financial success, combined with public relations value of all the recycling Two Rivers did, convinced Sutter Medical to award the company another demolition contract for the three-story medical Arts Building a block away. Of course, on that $80,437 job, Two Rivers recycled as much as possible there, as well. C&DR

The author is associate publisher of Construction & Demolition Recycling and executive director of the Construction Materials Recycling Association. He can be contacted via e-mail at turley@cdrecycling.org.