Demolition In UAE! pages: 38-40 - Pdworld.com

“Brokking” th
way forward
High reach demolition with a Brokk
hanging from a crane.
PDi Editor Andrei
Bushmarin recently
met with one of
Russia’s young
demolition companies
Deconstruction North-
West. The company
was started in 2006
and in a few years
showed tremendously
fast growth.
Text: Andrei Bushmarin
Photo: Deconstruction North-West
Many captains of industry, be they from the North America,
Europe or Asia, have expressed surprise at their Russian counterparts’
young ages. It appears that vast fortunes and brilliant
careers can be made much faster there than in the rest of the
world. However, before jumping to any conclusions it should
be recognised that this basically applies to those who started
their careers in the 1990s. During that tumultuous, yet highly
entrepreneurial decade, businesses sprouted like mushrooms
after a downpour. When the Iron Curtain collapsed, a whole
new generation of young and rigorous businessmen emerged,
who began to import Western cutting-edge technologies into
a country with the industrial base in a total shambles. The
then Russia was awash with make-or-break opportunities for
aspiring wheelers and dealers trying to make as much hay as
possible while the pallid northern sun was shining.
New millennium’s people
Alexei Melnik and Alexei Kudryavtsev, who head St.Petersburgbased
Deconstruction North-West, are young and both in their
early 30s. Still, they were born just a few years too late to jump
on the 90’s bandwagon. The other difference is that they have
quite consciously chosen break over make and have no regrets.
It was already six years into the new millennium, when the two
launched their company dealing in Brokk robots and offering
robotic demolition services in the northwestern part of Russia.
Peculiarities of the
national robotic demolition
It is often said about Russia that it is a country that works in
mysterious ways. This contention is highly debatable, but the
way the Brokk business has gone there was just as special as one
could have expected. While everywhere in the world construction
has been, and remains, the main field of application for
Brokk technology, in Russia it was steel mills and metallurgical
plants that were first interested in robotic demolition. Thriving
on high prices for steel and metals, they began to use Brokk
robots to remove burnt-out linings from their furnaces. Russia’s
construction society was largely unaware of robotic demolition,
and Alexeis saw it as a promising niche.
Having started out as a Brokk dealer in northwest Russia,
The picture above shows the renovation of the Blagoveshchensky
Bridge (former Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge) in
St.Petersburg.
they soon realized that performing demanding demolition jobs
would be the best way to promote Brokk’s brand in the region.
In the formative year of 2006, the company staff boasted just its
two founders, also functioning as sales managers, a civil engineer
and an operator of the only demonstration Brokk 180. By 2009
Deconstruction North-West had sold 15 robots in St.Petersburg
and increased the personnel several-fold.
When asked about the attitude of Russian specifiers
towards Brokk, the managers said that despite interest from
engineering quarters known for their open-mindedness, there
is still a lot of backward thinking in the industry. Even now,
many demolition projects in Russia are designed with manual
techniques in mind, and both specifiers and contractors are
reluctant to ditch the conventional methods that they have
been using for decades. Sometimes it takes much convincing
to make the specifiers see that they save virtually nothing by
using obsolete and often dangerous solutions.
To remain competitive and promote its cause, Deconstruction
North-West has to do its Brokk jobs on the same price
level as the manual demolishers. The technology’s efficiency
and versatility help keep the operating costs down. As practice
shows, Brokk is especially cost-effective when used together with
other modern demolition methods like diamond cutting.
Powerful, versatile and safe
The old mentality may be dying hard but it is bound to go
anyway. Deconstruction North-West has now solved enough
difficult projects to prove Brokk’s superiority over timeconsuming
and ineffective manual techniques. The most vivid
example, perhaps, is the removal of the two top floors of a hotel
in Vasilievsky Ostrov, one of the most original and romantic
districts in St.Petersburg. On this job, the company worked
alongside another demolition contractor. That company used
dated impact methods, while Deconstruction North-West operated
two Brokk 180 units. It was the modern-day approach of
Deconstruction North-West that allowed its general contractor
to complete their half of the job two months ahead of their
24 PDi • Is s u e 3 - 2009 • Au g - Se p t