Wolf said:
The question is, James, what was in the bank vault when you popped it open?

Nothing of value at all, just some non confidential office papers.

Has anyone found anything of interest/value when the popped open a safe during demolition?

In a house demo we found some old coins that had fallen behind a safe, but never something of "value" inside of one.

Does anybody remember the prime time special with Geraldo Rivera when they popped open Al Capone's vault?

Oh yeah, funniest damn thing. I remember watching it, he just sucked all of us right in to watch it too. I remember him getting excited when he found a bottle and he kept saying there is more I know it!

OK, I remember hearing about that building.

1man, is that the Dahlgren Virgina site? I won a bid there back in the 90's to scrap a gang of armor plate. It seemed like everything was overbuilt there.

The toughest building I have encounterd was a Hydrogen Bomb testing building at the Naval Surface Warfare Center...It was 8ft thick concrete walls and roof with 4 inch steel walls in the center...My first approach was with a 10,000 lb Hammer It just bounced off wouldnt even penatrate..2nd approach was with a 15,000 lb hammer just bounced off....Brought in the crane with 100 ft of stick and a 8500 lb ball , it hit the roof and bounced off...tried a 10,ooo lb ball same thing...Ok so we tried to drill and shoot it..drill bits were burning up 3 inches into the walls...As of today the building still stands

I was working on a project in Canada and there was a 8 story precast parking garage (they call them Parkades eh?) being demolished across the street. At lunchtime the entire structure collapsed. 10 minutes earlier there were probably about 15 guys working in it.

I demo'd a coal prep house that was 110 feet tall and roughly 10000 square feet at the base. It was full of steel ( about 300 tons worth) but the kicker was that on two sides I had a 120000volt buss line about 6" from the walls at about 30 feet high I wanted to shoot it but the power company was afraid of the impact throwing their switching gear in the next building haywire. We ended up dropping the steel from the inside(took about 10 weeks) then we had to hand wreck the walls down to about fifty feet so we could pull the walls away from the buss lines. She had a steel skeletal frame with 8 course of brick. The hand wrecking took another 3 weeks with my crew suspended from a hanging basket I engineered from a 20 yard container. I welded lugs on the container, had it load tested and stamped by a PE and hung it from a 110 ton Grove. I have some pics of my demo crew working in the air, if I can dig them out I'll scan them and post them.

I worked on a building one time that had 3 24" wide flange steel columns butted flange to flange and welded. Then they surrounded that with vertical rebar and spiral wrapped the whole thing and then poured concrete around the whole thing. That was just one column. The elevator shafts were poured in place as were the stairwells.