The 94-year-old Belchers Corner is finally set to come down in a painstaking three-month demolition removing 800 tonnes of material and costing about $700,000.
“It’s all (to be) done by hand,” said Michael Nigido, council’s building surveyor. “It’s all heavy manual labour.”
The building could not withstand “forces and loads applied by heavy machinery” due to its poor structural integrity, making conventional demolition dangerous, Mr Nigido explained.
“The basis of all work that we are carrying out is safety,” he said.
The “30 or so” workers on the site each day would use small handheld jackhammers and demolition saws instead, Mr Nigido said.
Workers were currently erecting scaffolding to the rear of Belchers corner and would put up a scaffold across the front of the building next week, Mr Nigido said.
Contractors would use “reverse construction” to “cut and slice” the building from the top down following an internal strip-out, with temporary supports to keep it stable, he said.
They would also build a new wall for the adjacent Hopetoun Chambers, which currently shares its eastern wall with Belchers Corner, he added.
Mr Nigido warned motorists of delays as City Hall cordoned-off footpaths and partially-closed Ryrie St.
“We have put in place measures and signage around the city with VicRoads to alert motorists to avoid the area if possible,” he said.
Trucks from the site would exit onto Ryrie St, with council to extend green light signals on Ryrie, McKillop and Kilgour Sts by 20 seconds to “flush” congestion, Mr Nigido said.
Council evicted 24 businesses from Belchers Corner in mid-2018 after the discovery of concrete cancer that had caused the building to compress by about 6cm.
City Hall aimed to recover “100 per cent” of the combined $2 million cost of demolition and stabilising the building, its planning director Gareth Smith said.
“It was very fortunate that it was found and reported at the time and there wasn’t a catastrophe.”
The site is located in a zone with a “maximum preferred height” of 32m with no mandatory height limit.
Council were aware of “some interest in potential purchase” of the site following the demolition, Mr Smith said.
