Four decades after crews erected Louisville’s downtown convention center on Fourth Street, a new generation of builders is carefully disassembling all that handiwork and sending most of the demolition debris out for recycling.
It would be a lot easier to bring in a wrecking ball, and push a mass of broken-up construction materials into giant piles to be hauled away to a dump, said Tim Livingston, senior superintendent for Hunt Construction Group, which is overseeing the work in one of the busiest blocks in Louisville. But that’s not an option for construction projects like this one that seeks green building certification, he said.
So like the construction-site equivalent of separating paper, plastic, glass and aluminum for household recycling, workers are carefully cutting, pulling, breaking apart and separating for industrial recycling the western half of the convention center to make way for new, larger and more modern facility.
“It’s very different from just letting things drop,” Livingston said. “We have to be real concerned about safety, taking it down in increments.”
Workers have been tethered 60 feet up, using cutting torches to break apart much of the center’s iconic rooftop metal truss. Others operate cranes, boom lifts, graders and heavy-duty vehicles with giant scissor-like appendages or jackhammers. They are leveling the whole block bounded by Third, Fourth, Jefferson and Market streets in one of the larger local building demolition projects in recent times. This western half of the convention center opened in 1977, and the eastern half 鈥� which will remain in place with renovations 鈥� was added in 2000.
Construction started in August on the $207 million, 22-month renovation and expansion of the Kentucky International Convention Center, which is managed by the Kentucky State Fair Board. The project’s design team seeks silver LEED green building certification, the second-highest of four rankings from the U.S. Green Building Council.
But before green features are built to promote energy and water efficiency, the plan is to recycle at least 77 percent of the 18,851 tons of concrete, metal, bricks and blocks involved in bringing the convention center’s western half to ground level. That tonnage represents about 3 percent of all the construction and demolition debris generated in Louisville and Jefferson County in a typical year, according to the Louisville Metro Solid Waste Management Department.
“Everything is being tracked properly,” said project manager Andrew Moore with EOP Architects. “It is a fairly large task and we do have fairly lofty goals on what we are trying to achieve on this project. We have got a qualified contractor that is used to doing that type of process. There is no learning curve there.”
The whole center has been closed, with lane closures surrounding the work.
To help lessen traffic congestion, workers don’t haul materials away during morning and evening rush hours, and the noisy demolition is limited to the daytime so as not to keep nearby hotel guests awake, Moore said.
The cramped downtown location amid dense foot and car traffic means extra security is needed to safely and quickly escort trucks coming and going and to keep people who don’t belong there out. Exterior fences are designed to keep potentially dangerous flying fragments from escaping.
People downtown have watched a gaping whole open where a ballroom and exhibit hall once entertained guests. Soon the Fourth Street entrance will be leveled.
Local companies were sought to do the recycling, such as Innovative Crushing and Aggregate Inc., River Metals, and EcoTech.
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