Berlin advances into the future

The Berlin Demolition Conference, organised for the first time entirely by the Deutscher Abbruchverband, was held on Friday 16th March 2012 at the usual venue of the Hotel Berlin. The DA took on the organisation of the event from its retiring founder, Dr Dieter Korth and his company ASCO, who established the event and built it into one of the largest events of its kind worldwide.

With over 600 delegates attending the conference and a record 75 exhibitors taking space to display their wares, this year's event was the largest to date and there were two other major firsts this year as well. As signs of the DA's intent to broaden the event's appeal, for the first time there was simultaneous English translation for those papers that were presented in German and the association's intent is to continue this into the future to make the event much more attractive for the non-German speaking industry around the world.

Its greater international nature was further evidenced by the fact that, again for the first time, the conference programme featured two presentations that were made in English (naturally also requiring simultaneous English to German translation for many of the delegates).

In actual fact, there were three such presentations, with Stephano Panseri sneaking in an extra one not on the programme - in this instance, the European launch of Despe's TopDown modular system for demolishing multi-storey structures that was first announced by Giuseppe Panseri, the company's president, at the NDA convention in San Antonio, Texas, earlier the same week (your editor therefore got to see the video twice in four days). We hope to report on the first use of the system on a project in Paris in an issue of D&Ri later this year.

As is traditional at this event, the programme was a challenging one, with 21 papers delivered during the four conference sessions. Topics covered were diverse, ranging from training (the subject of three,), German standards and legislation, hand held analytical tools, including Alert, through to the health implications of carrying out demolition works, methods of safeguarding plant on site and the use of high pressure demolition techniques.

Specific projects of course made up a considerable part of the content. In addition to the Caorso report, a second nuclear project discussed was the removal of the biological shield at the Stade plant in Germany. Others included the demolition of a 140 m (460 ft) chimney, the redevelopment of the central post office building in Speyer, an explosive demolition of a hotel in Stuttgart and, also in Stuttgart, the demolition of the north wing of that city's central railway station.