Dubai may be a city better known for putting buildings up than pulling them down. But demolitions are still commonplace, regardless of how many undeveloped lots dot the city. The Metropolitan Hotel, built in 1979, is being demolished in order to facilitate the Al Habtoor Group’s $1.3 billion redevelopment of the hotel site. When completed in 2016, the development will comprise of three hotels catering for luxury, lifestyle and business clients.
Haptoor Leighton Group have been contracted to carry out the construction, which will start later this year. But Al Haptoor have a direct contract with Al Rasheed Demolition to carry out the demolition, with project director Martyn Wild of Al Habtoor saying the demolition contract was organised before the contract for the construction was signed.
A contractor for the strip-out came in March, and then Al Rasheed began the demolition work in April. They are required to complete the demolition by July 24, though by all accounts are ahead of schedule, and could finish by the end of June, with another contract to begin work on straight away.
The Metropolitan Hotel was built when Sheikh Zayed Rd was just a single lane, now it is a roaring highway. But more relevant to the demolition process is the Dubai Metro, which runs immediately adjacent the site. Dubai RTA imposed specific restrictions on the machines that could be used near the side of the property that the metro runs alongside.
They are observing the project daily says Mujeebur Rahman, projects manager at Al Rasheed Demolition. “If they are feeling any difficulties from their side, they will immediately come and inform us.”
There is a 38-metre clearance from the site to the metro track, and Rahman says the transit authorities have required that all boom heights be at least five metres less than this, meaning that no machines with a boom height greater than 32 metres can be used.
In the unlikely event that a machine should topple, it would not be able to cause damage to the metro line concrete pylons. The RTA is careful to monitor that no material is flying over the wall.
On the day PMV visited the demolishers were using a number of Caterpillar excavators, 235s, a 350, and a 350L excavator fitted with a hammer. A couple of Cat wheel-loaders were being used to shift rubble, and shore up the ramp the excavators were working on.
The smaller one-storey buildings in the centre of the site were the first to be demolished. Work then shifted to the larger blocks. Initially a drop ball was used to level the buildings, but while the perimeter walls fell quickly, the centre of the blocks, with the criss-cross of corridor and bedroom walls, proved too rigid, and the excavators were judged to be the more effective machine to use. As it is said: Horses for courses.
“Demolition is a combination of art and science,” says Wild. “You can look at all the drawings, but until you actually start hitting the building you can’t tell how it’s going to behave,” says Wild.
Rubble has been pushed into ramps to allow the machines access to the higher floors. It’s an approach that will facilitate the demolition of the trickiest building on the site to demolish, which is Haptoor Three, a five-story building close to apartments alongside the hotel site that are being retained.
A crane will be used to demolish the first half of the building, away from the side to be protected. Once half has been knocked down, there will be sufficient rubble to build a ramp up to the building, and what remains will be pulled down by excavators, having driven up the ramp.
Material will fall a maximum of two metres away from the side of the building says Wild, meaning there will be no damage to the apartments, though the majority will fall in the direction it is pulled.
Although the demolition is in full swing, the rebuild remains the focus, and a strip on the north side of the site will be cleared and passed over to the main contractors, and the shoring contractors will begin working along the boundary while the demolition work is still underway.
At a second interval another strip of the site will be turned over to the shoring contractor while the remainder of the demolition on the southern side of the site is being completed, and members of the HLG team are already on-site preparing for the build.
Readying the site for the shoring contractors requires the old foundations to be removed, though these are not piles, only raft foundations, and the rubble to be trucked out.
Some of the rubble has been used to create the base of the access road for machinery to the site. The traffic of residents, who remain in the buildings adjacent the site, is being kept separate from the construction site traffic, and the temporary road built with a rubble base will stay in place for the duration of the four-year build.
The presence of the residential apartments nearby means that hours of demolition have also been limited by Al Haptoor, from 7am to 6pm five days a week, and after 2pm on the weekends. While it may be less than ideal, as Wild says, you can’t live in Dubai and not expect to live near a construction site.
According to the Rahman, the operators doing the work are all highly trained, with those doing the main work having between 20 and 22 years experience each.
He says the company owns around 18 machines, ranging in age from three to 12 years.
They have mostly Cat equipment, common in Dubai, since they are easy to service and source spare-parts for.
Al Rasheed own the machines they use on the job, though occasionally will rent in extra equipment if they need to work quicker to complete a project by the contracted date. They also have a fleet of 34 trucks, used for amongst other things, to truck rubble to the landfill.
As much as the demolishers are required to clear the site by the contracted date, their main focus is on the profit of the material and objects which can be recovered from the buildings.
Wild says that the fee paid to the demolition company is nowhere near the cost of undertaking the demolition work, but that demolition workers like Al Rasheed produces significant revenue from the salvaging of metal, mainly steel and some copper cables, from the site.
A Hyundai digger is being used to crush the concrete encasing the steel, and workers then cut the steel to handleable lengths, before it is loaded on a truck, with Pakistan or India its destination for processing. “Look how clean the steel is,” says Wild. “That’s been encased in concrete for 34 years, it’s as good as new.”
Doors and windows and anything salvageable is recovered. An escalator in the building – there was only one – was stripped out, dismantled, and sent to Afghanistan to be installed in building. Many of the doors and windows will be sent to Afghanistan and Pakistan for reuse.
“Reused, recycling – commercially it makes sense, but it’s also green, very green,” says Wild. “It’s a nice tie-up between commercial and the environment. The contractor is incentivised to do it, because he’s going to make money out of it. He’s not doing it for the good of the planet, or is he? It doesn’t matter, but he’s doing it, big time.”
Wild says that Al Habtoor will never know the value of the steel extracted from the site. But by that same token, Al Rasheed can only estimate the value of the steel in the building before they begin the work, says manager Rahman.
“It is only an approximation,” he says. “We cannot tell how much steel will come out, we do not have the drawings since the building is 34 years old. It is approximations and assumptions.”
While much of the concrete may be dumped in the landfill, the contractor is again incentivised to find someone who needs a load of fill, to save on the costs of dumping it.
When it was built in 1979 the Metropolitan Hotel was the first hotel in the area, and it was at the behest of Sheikh Rashid, who gave the land to Khalaf Al Habtoor, chairman of Al Habtoor Group.
“Sheikh Rashid had a great vision for Dubai and knew what Sheikh Zayed Road would become which is why he gave me that land,” Al Habtoor said at the recent closing ceremony.
Wild says that the hotel was a part of Dubai’s emergence, and the Group has decided to record the process of the demolition and the building of the new hotels. Three time-lapse cameras are mounted at strategic locations around the site, including one mounted on scaffolding on the roof of the adjacent apartments.
The cameras are each taking one picture every hour, and will do so for the full four years while the project is completed.
“We feel the responsibility to record this process, because Dubai has a lot of cultural history, but not much physical history,” explains Wild.
“We felt it our duty to record this for posterity. We filmed from the closing of the hotel, and it will go right through to the opening of the new hotels, a proper TV-quality documentary.”
Largest hotel complex in the ME
Al Habtoor Group expects that by the end of the year contractors Habtoor-Leighton will have excavated the site of the new complex and neighbouring underground carpark and ground level garden area.
It will be the first steps in the building of what will become the largest integrated hotel complex in the Middle East, comprising a five-level podium, one 36-storey tower and one 25-storey tower within a total gross floor area of 350,000m².
In all there will be 1600 rooms across three hotels, which will be operated by Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which will open the St Regis Dubai, the W Dubai – Sheikh Zayed Road, and a 966-key The Westin Dubai Sheikh Zayed Road. The Habtoor Palace complex – which was unveiled in January – will include 1100-seat theatre, a shopping arcade, tennis and sports academy and multiple-themed restaurant.
Steel recovery
Reclamation and recycling of steel is big business, and around 40% of steel that is used today is recycled, particularly in items such as automobiles and home appliances. Recycling a tonne of steel is cheaper and more efficient than producing it from iron ore, both in terms of the raw materials required, and the energy used to convert these into steel.
According to the Bureau of International Recycling, a tonne of steel made from scrap emits 58% less CO2₂than when made from ore. Recycling one tonne of steel also saves 1,100 kilogrammes of iron ore, 630 kilogrammes of coal, and 55 kilogrammes of limestone.
For demolition businesses such as Al Rasheed, the amount of steel that can be recovered from a prospective job needs to be estimated, and is a major determinant of the overall economy of a demolition job.
The copper used in wiring is another valuable metal recovered during demolitions. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia are regional centres of scrap metal activity in the Middle East, and it has been estimated that as much as five million tonnes per annum goes through the UAE, followed by Saudi Arabia with three million tonnes.
The value of scrap metal dropped heavily during the GFC due to reduced demand, but has seen a steady recovery. Over 400 million tonnes of metal are now recycled across the world every year.