A “groundbreaking” next step has taken place for demolition of the former IRS site in Covington.
Cincinnati-based firm O’Rourke Wrecking has announced their schedule for their demolition of the IRS building.
Jeff Sizemore, project manager for O’Rourke, laid out the demolition schedule Thursday at a meeting with the city of Covington.
“We’re super thankful and happy to be awarded the project here,” Sizemore said. “The demolition and environmental remediation is a historic project here for the city. We’re a Cincinnati company. We’re used to working here. We’ve been in business for 60 years. We’ve done lots of large scale small scale demolition projects.”
In total, the project is scheduled to last from March 7 to Sept. 30. The abatement and building demolition will end on Aug. 26. Asphalt/site removals will happen from July 29 to Aug. 25. Site re-grading and shaping the site in order to drain will last from Aug. 22 to Sept.16. From Sept. 12 to Sept. 23, O’Rourke will restore disturbed areas with grass seed and straw mulch. The project’s estimated completion is Friday, Sept. 30.
O’Rourke has been in the process of completing the abatement. Sizemore said he expects the abatement to be finished in approximately three weeks. Sizemore said April 18 is the date when O’Rourke is scheduled to begin live demolition.
Prior to the commencement of demolition, all materials containing asbestos and other hazardous items will be properly abated and removed from the site. O’Rourke said there will be no hazards to adjacent properties or pedestrians. The demolition will be contained within the fenced-in property line and should not impact any area outside of the property. All environmental remediation work is set to be completed under safety guidelines set forth by local and federal governing bodies.
“We’ve been in contact with Duke to kill the utility. We’ve been utilizing electricity to do our containments and the electricity for lighting to do the abatement,” Sizemore said. “Now that we’re wrapping up and we’re about to go live, we’ve been working with Duke to get them to come out and kill the electricity on site. Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of storms lately, so Duke has been super busy. As soon as they’re able to come out there, they will get out there before we get done. We’ll utilize some generators. We come on site and finish up the project.”
O’Rourke will begin to transport larger construction equipment from their Millennium Hotel project in Cincinnati to the IRS site. Some of the equipment will take time to assemble on-site.
Sizemore went on to say that most of the debris material O’Rourke will be dealing with is metal. The IRS building doesn’t feature much masonry, which is notorious for creating airborne dust on demolition sites. Sizemore said O’Rourke would be utilizing engineering protocols to mitigate any dust, as well as wetting down the streets.
“The good news is there’s not gonna be a lot of dust,” Sizemore said. “It’s just the type of building materials doesn’t lend itself to dust that much. It’ll be a lot of machines. There’s going to be a lot of truckloads. I mean, there’s 1,000s of truckloads of debris to come off the site. Unfortunately, there’s no better way to do it.”
The City of Covington will be the main communication line for the project. Dan Hassert, Communications Director for Covington, said the city will be extremely active in communicating progress to the public.
“We put out multiple press releases every day. When we do that, you can sign up we will e-blast it to your email. We we put it front and center on our website. We’re very active on social media and everything will be linked there,” Hassert said. “If there was some sort of unusual circumstance where they had to come in after hours on Saturday or on Sunday, if it’s something that unusual that was going to affect the neighbors, we would then get into action and then we would make sure that everybody knew that.”
Covington City Commissioner Ron Washington emphasized his confidence in O’Rourke Wrecking for getting the demolition done in a safe and timely manner.
“One reason that we picked this company was because we knew they were customer friendly and citizen friendly,” Washington said. “That was one of our considerations. We have confidence that you all will work with our citizens and our businesses.”
