Demolition and site clearance was awarded to I&R Demolition for the Big Cats House at Blackpool Zoo. The project consisted of demolishing the old tiger and lion enclosures to make way for a much larger replacement big cat house. This was a very unique project and setting working inside a zoo surrounded by animals and a welcome change.
As the zoo was remaining open to the pubic throughout the course of the demolition and construction we had to implicate strict health and safety measures to ensure the public are kept away from any dangers that might become apparent. The location of the big cats house on the zoo site meant we would have to drive vehicles for plant/skips delivery on the wide tarmac walkways that were also used by the public walking round the zoo. Faced with the fact that the public and construction traffic would have to use the same walkways posed an extremely high health and safety risk and one which we solved by only letting construction traffic enter the zoo complex between 8am and 10am for skip / plant deliveries and collections with the last vehicle out by 09:50am as the zoo opened to the public at 10am. This control measure ensured that the public and construction traffic would never cross paths completely eliminating the risk. This meant we had to carefully plan our logistics especially with skip exchanges.
The demolition was undertaken using one of our 22 ton excavators with the building consisting of a steel frame and concrete flat roof construction. All materials were segregated and live loaded into roll on roll of skips as the demolition progressed. Remaining hardcore materials were crushed into 6f2 material along with the floor slab and old drainage.
The demolition and site clearance was complete in a 2 week period.