Seemingly unnoticed, today is 15 years on from old Canberra Hospital implosion.
July 13 1997 the public were encouraged by the ACT government to come and watch the end of an era, ending in a dark day for many.
It should have been a fairly trivial event but seemingly though sheer lack of technical expertise the job ended in a terrible failure.
15 years on it doesn’t seem like much has changed. There are still plenty of failings (GDE bridge collapse) and others.
So i wonder have we been learning from these mistakes or just repeating them?
[Thanks to Skidbladnir for pointing us at the video]
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I looked after the hospital for 3 years after it was retired until its demise. Still had tenants in the building including the dyalisis floor and Ray Redmond on the 5th floor. Accommodated the rowing club and gliders. Walking thru every day in the surgery, kitchen in dark corridors was an eirie experience. Like Aliens. But I never saw a ghost or any frightening phenomenon. Even though I thought I was receptive. Surgery rooms in the dark is not easy. We had cabinets full of construction plans of the building but they were ignored. Tried to show them how solid this building was. But again ignored. The demo guys were just cowboys. Such a shame. But it was for me and our team under John Lalor was an amazing experience. I will never forget that. Thanks John.
poetix said :
You said it.
HenryBG said :
Oh Henry BG, I am so grateful. I really had no idea. Actually, I think you just proved c_c’s point.
But that’s more than enough cheerful banter from me on a thread about a child’s death.
johnboy said :
This. Public demolitions have been done safely for a long time.
poetix said :
Don’t be silly – he’s clearly using “insular”, here, as an adjective.
Disinformation said :
That may have been one of the news camera tripods. One of the stations covering the aftermath mentioned a large bit of shrapnel hitting a news station tripod. I have a recollection that one channel reported that particular piece going on to hit Katie Bender.
Some of the people in boats were lucky to get away unscathed. I noticed a small boat with 2 people in bottom right hand corner of this shot:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/photogallery/act-news/fifteen-years-since-the-hospital-implosion-tragedy-20120713-220l7.html?selectedImage=0
They are dwarfed by the closest splash, despite being closer to the camera.
johnboy said :
In my googling for Rod McCracken (the powder monkey, “shot firer” being the official term), there’s quite a few references to enquiries and issues with work done. It’s an interesting industry. Many years ago, a club I was in was extending its accommodation facilities, and the builder who had oversight of the project hired some powder monkeys to get rid of some massive boulders on the site, so we could excavate. They laid their charges, we retreated inside, and what followed was the most almighty series of explosions. The powder monkeys looked shocked. When we went outside, bits of boulder – BIG bits of boulder – were everywhere, including on vehicles way down the street, on other buildings… significant destruction.
The powder monkeys muttered something and disappeared. Neither we, nor the builder, ever heard from them again.
Poor kid. Katie went to my school (though I didn’t know her) and I remember it took people a long time to recover from the loss. Unfortunately her family will never recover. I cannot believe it was promoted as a fun family day out. Kate Carnell should have been driven out of town for this stuff-up.
On the other hand the merkins manage to bring down casino’s in front of a hundred thousand drunken revellers.
The staggering incompetence of the contractor, and the award of that contract, are more culpable for mine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWCVIlktX-k
Not sure if this has been linked-to here:
http://www.sieves.com.au/sieves-articles/1999/3/21/a-death-that-should-not-have-been-told-part-two/
but it’s quite good, lot of info chimes with what I remember too.
LSWCHP said :
Testing my memory now, but we were retained by the contractor to find him some labourers. The contractor was a family business, him and sons, they blew into Canberra and never stopped dropping the usual cliched “jokes” about how bad Canberra was. The labourers were to fill sandbags and pack them around the explosives, the heavy work.
Also from memory, the contractor had made some assumptions about the hospital’s construction which proved on examination to be misplaced, there was a lot more steel in the concrete than he’d originally thought, so evidently he upped the explosives. Thing is, you see that design of hospital everywhere in Australia, must have been a flurry of hospital building in the late 50s/early 60s. I’d imagine they were built in a similar manner, so it’s puzzling that the construction came as a surprise to him.
I imagine that Carnell and co didn’t want their tendering methods looked-at too closely, hence the lack of a proper enquiry. I bet that particular powder monkey didn’t put THAT job on his future tender submissions however.
LSWCHP said :
I had just been posted to Canberra the week before and having heard the advertising, decided to scout the new city for a reasonable vantage point. In my explorations, I found what I thought might be a convenient spot.
Then I had second thoughts and figured that I would actually prefer to watch it on TV instead.
Being unfamiliar with Canberra, I had no idea where the fatality was located when it was reported.
Some years later, while walking around the lake, I came to the general area where I’d planned to watch and saw the memorial to young Katy.
When mentioning this to a friend later that day, he revealed that he’d been very close to that same point and a guy just in front of them had his tripod mounted camera taken out by a chunk of shrapnel.
I think that it was incredible that more people weren’t killed, given the amount of near-misses that were obvious from the footage.
I’m still amazed that it’s still referred to as an “implosion”.
c_c said :
Shouldn’t that be insula?
I remember thinking what drama queens some people I knew were, when they complained about how near shrapnel had come to them during the demolition. (They were on kayaks on the lake.) And how the news of the little girl’s death gradually came out. Just awful to think that a child died in such a needless display.
HenryBG said :
As you have so much time to investigate this in great detail, I’d suggest getting a life. It’s really kind of sad.
But then, we public school students did always notice the private schoolers in college were a bit detached from reality and insular.
Thumper said :
I used to be in the same line of work as Thumper, and I’ve also done my fair share of shooting and exploding things. I heard all the advertising hoopla at the time, and I thought that I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. The very idea of making a public spectacle out of a large explosion seemed like like absolute insanity to me at the time, and I thought it would end in tears.
Sadly, it did, and I feel very sorry for the Bender family.
I also wonder why no heads rolled as a result of such a colossal stuffup. The footage I’ve seen of the explosives being laid indicated to me that the contractor had no idea about how to bring a structure down. They charges actually looked to my slightly educated eye like they were laid to blow the place upwards.
And Mr G, what you wrote originally is not OK.
c_c said :
Indeed, and yet I am not so dim as to confuse a noun with an adjective.
c_c said :
That’s a pretty vague excuse.
Try as I may, I am failing to get any auto-correct to come up with “peninsular” unless I actually put the “r” in there, which is what somebody confused about the difference between an adjective and a noun might do, I suppose.
HenryBG said :
You’re not bright, obviously the application didn’t auto-correct peninsula to peninsular, it auto-corrected a mispell of peninsula and without knowing the context, corrected to the adjective. Just as it use to correct “Youre” to “Your” before I programmed it to correct to “You’re”
Still a weakness of auto-correct or predictive typing tools, though one being addressed in the next version of Android apparently with contextual corrections made after a sentence is complete.
Frustrated said :
So the timesheet frackup (accounting and accountability) then the hosptial frackup what others things have they gotten wrong that we dont yet know?
How much have we wasted on bike lanes that go nowhere and changing speed limits for the hell of it.
Not to mention that Canberra is one of the most expensive places to live with no real tourism market.
The lack of a highspeed rail network to sydney is really holding back the ‘capital’. Not to mention the Snow town fiasco. (Why is the airport the only one who wants to competite with the busiest air route in the country?)
DFO/Brand depo, massive duplication and over build, failed on so many levels.
2003 Bush fires why wasn’t more done to reduce the risks. The warning system put in place after that which was testing during the Chemical plant explosion seems practically useless!
Building site safety a big issue, Several building site collapses. (Airport Belconnen car getting crushed) GDE bridge, + others)
At least their isnt many problems at hume hilton.
One would think that the elected candidates would have suitable project management skills.
Perhaps a far better lego challenge would be if we give them a few young kids to do the challenge for them. Their job would be to manage their workers instead even do a timesheet!
HenryBG said :
Now now, we both know Grammar only employs people who are vetted to join the club.
HenryBG said :
Or maybe Canwerra Gwammar’s proof-reader was doing jury duty on the day the advert needed checking…
c_c said :
They had probably employed somebody with deficient education. Or maybe “the auto-correct” did it”.