Industrial Demolition Contractors Spotlight: Elder’s Goldendale Aluminum Plant Demo

In a recent newsletter, hydraulic tool leader Stanley LaBounty featured Elder Demolition’s largest project ever, the demolition of the Goldendale Aluminum Plant. Industrial demolition contractors will appreciate the scope of this project when hearing that Elder Demolition provided major structural demolition for 1.2 million square feet of buildings.

As the Stanley LaBounty piece highlights, Elder Demolition completed the core of this enormous project in the summer of 2011. Because we specialize in total building and structural demolition, especially industrial and commercial projects involving heavy concrete and steel, we were well-equipped to take on the Goldendale Aluminum Plant and won the bid for the structural part of the project in November 2010. (An earlier bid for dismantling the 500 pots and other hazardous materials went to other industrial demolition contractors.)

By January of the following year, Elder Demolition had begun dismantling various pieces of equipment around the plant. During this time, our building demo permits were being processed. Once the permits were approved in late April 2011, we were able to dive into the crux of the demolition work – tearing down the buildings where 1,000 people were once employed to churn out nearly 500 tons of aluminum every day.

However, the story of the Goldendale Aluminum Plant demo isn’t just about demolition. We were able to reuse tons of materials from this plant for other purposes:

• Dozens of truckloads of boilers and other miscellaneous equipment were sold to be reused elsewhere. As industrial demolition contractors, we minimize negative environmental impacts by dismantling and reusing as much of the materials as possible.
• Most of the buildings we demolished at the Goldendale plant were made of structural steel with aluminum roofing; this material was recycled.
• We maintain our own concrete crusher that can be used on-site. The Goldendale demo contained 100,000 tons of concrete, which we crushed and spread around to create a flat area. This gravel-lined zone will be helpful for any future building on the site.

In these economically uncertain days, many industrial demolition contractors – Oregon to Florida – have cut back on equipment investment. When the economy started to tank, Elder Demolition had an alternative vision: to be one of the very few demo companies that could still offer commercial and industrial total building and structural demolition. Through consistent investment in our equipment – including hammers, electromagnets, shears and long-reach excavators – we positioned ourselves to take on the largest demolition projects available.