When Visco Demolition Contractors in Edmonton took on the task of demolishing the Sir Alexander Mackenzie post office downtown to make way for the new Royal Alberta Museum, crews had to perform their own brand of special delivery.
"It was challenging," said Visco general manager Ron Visser of the nine-month long tear-down of the major mail processing centre that opened in 1966.
The facility included elevators able to accommodate drive-in postal trucks and was built rock solid to handle the large and hefty weighs of mail passing through it.
"It was one of the best built buildings that I have seen in my career of over 30 years. It was over-engineered to the point of not being engineered," he said.
His crews ran into steel beams that were six-feet high and 200-feet long,
They were too large to use hydraulic sheers on.
Visser is amazed at the number of large beams, imprinted with Canada Iron, and how the original construction crew was able to handle such large beams without the heavy equipment that industry utilizes today.
For six months, he dedicated part of his crew to manually cutting the hefty beams into segments for recycling.
Crews ran into massive concrete footings, which were so unexpected that they called Visser down to the site.
They couldn’t believe what they were encountering.
"They were the biggest we have seen," he said adding the concrete pad itself measured four feet in thickness and 30 feet long and often included a seven-inch solid steel plate."
There were hundreds and hundreds of pieces of rebar in each footing," he said.
In places, these footing were only a few metres apart.
He said that these sorts of heavy footings are usually reserved for 60-storey buildings – 10 times the size of the postal processing centre.
Visser said he called upon his 70-year-old father Neil, the company founder and president, to help out as demolition crews had never run into such a solid building.
"The building was built to last 150 years or more," said Visser, adding it was much stronger than any new building that is built today.
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