A perfect pairing

In February, Ontario-based Priestly Demolition Inc. (PDI) completed its majority acquisition of Green City Demolition, Cincinnati, establishing a partnership the firm says will “enable both companies to expand their service offering[s] and collaborate on bigger, more diverse demolition projects.”

PDI has operations in Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary, as well as in Virginia in the U.S. Its purchase of Green City represents PDI’s first acquisition in the U.S. and expands the more-than-25-year-old demolition firm’s presence into Kentucky and Ohio.

With a well-established reputation and network of clients in the lower Midwest, PDI’s Executive Vice President of North American Operations Brian Priestly tells Construction & Demolition Recycling (C&DR) that Green City’s commitment to good service is what initially attracted the two companies to one other.

“What really brought Green City and Priestly together was the ownership as well as the culture—strong teams of people that want to do good work, provide excellent service to the customer and make it home safely at the end of each day,” he says.

In addition to customer satisfaction, Green City President Dan Thomas says PDI’s can-do attitude and innovative approaches to demolition projects make for a good pairing.

“Their attitude is [that] there isn’t anything … they can’t find a solution to. They will engage the entire team to come up with innovative solutions and smart ideas [by] thinking outside the box,” he says. “And the willingness of everyone within their organization to help streamline that— you almost have to see it to believe it.

“Communication, the engineered plan and a safety-first approach all seem to be aligned. It was a total success.” – Brian Priestly, VP of North American Operations, Priestly Demolition

“Even when you go out and meet their operators, they’re always willing to take a few minutes to help. I mean, I was just on-site with three of their heavy equipment operators, and we were going over the techniques and their knowledge base, and they were willing to share that knowledge and show us exactly how and why. … I’ve come from some bigger offices, and you get guys that aren’t willing to give up that information; you had to drag it out of them. [PDI] is just extremely kind and friendly, and they’ve got everybody’s best interest [in mind].”

Prior to joining Green City in 2016, Thomas was a project manager for New York-based LVI Services Inc., which was acquired by Brea, California-based NCM Group Holdings LLC in 2014. There, he helped oversee several large projects, including the demolition of a few Pfizer facilities in Michigan; DuPont facilities in Louisville, Kentucky; and a $60 million renovation of Madison Square Garden in New York.

“The hedge funds had collided and … decided to merge, and I didn’t want to move to New York full time because my family was here [in Lexington, Kentucky]. I worked for another small demo outfit and then said, ‘You know what, I’m just going to start my own [firm] with my partner [Eric Rothwell] out of Louisville,’” he says. “They already … were demolishing small houses and small buildings, and we pretty much grew it up from there.

“We started in Cincinnati with nothing, no equipment [or] anything, and just started doing interior demos and abatement and then worked our way up,” Thomas says.

Lending hand

As a PDI company, Green City will operate independently but with the co-branding of the two firms. With PDI’s backing, Thomas says Green City can bid on larger projects. For smaller firms, he says it can be difficult to support the manpower, equipment, financing and bonding needed for larger, more extensive projects.

“[PDI] does almost everything in-house, and that was very appealing to us,” Thomas says.

Now, he says help from PDI is just “a phone call away,” so Green Demolition does not need to work as hard to find support for larger projects. “And they have such a good reputation. I’ve been following them for years and watching the work that they do,” Thomas adds.

These resources were instrumental during the demolition and abatement of Procter & Gamble’s (P&G’s) former Sharon Woods Innovation Center campus in the Blue Ash neighborhood in Cincinnati. Originally built in 1978 as a production research and development center, the demolition of the P&G campus is part of a bigger plan to prime the roughly 50-acre site for redevelopment.

In September of last year, Green City began asbestos abatement on the structure, which is comprised of Buildings A, B and C. Thomas says crews worked fast to beat the upcoming cold weather and started the demolition of Building C in October while finishing abatement on Buildings A and B.

Buildings A and C were demolished by December 2022, and Green City completed the demolition of Building B this February.

PDI got involved in the project in December of last year as the two companies began the process of closing on the acquisition. This provided Green City with extra equipment and operators to expedite the demolition, including a Liebherr R 954 C high-reach excavator with a 100-foot stick and a Komatsu PC490LC-11 equipped with a LaBounty MSD 4500 mobile shear.

These machines were used alongside Green City’s existing equipment, which included a Hitachi ZX470LCH-3 hydraulic excavator with an 80-foot boom, Volvo EC360 and EC250E excavators, a Caterpillar 336 hydraulic excavator, a Hyundai HX220L excavator, a Liebherr R 914 compact excavator with a second-member shear, a Caterpillar 950 GC front loader and skid steers.

“[First] we did a full abatement on the project on the inside; it was about 400,000 square feet—almost all the ceiling had to be scraped. So, every bit of soft debris came out of the structure prior to the demo,” Thomas says. “When we got to bringing the buildings down, it was just brick, block, steel and concrete, so, we were able to handle it a little better [by] just shearing it down and breaking it up.

“We basically just cut it apart with the shears to bring it down, and we pulled the legs out of the second floor.”

By the time Green City Demolition started on the last building, Thomas says PDI was able to supply a second excavator to help speed up the work.

“That’s really the slowest part of the process—using the long boom and that little shear, trying to cut it apart,” he adds. “Our [Hitachi] 470 with the second member (that acts like a regular boom) could reach almost to the top of the second floor. Once they got the top of it off enough, they’d come in, we’d switch the booms out real quick … and then go in and use a much larger shear and cut it off.”

Making it work

While the demolition of the four-story buildings went smoothly, crews did have to contend with a few challenges.

On the north side of the property is the Sycamore School District’s bus compound, which is leased from RER Ventures and Vandercar—partners in the planned redevelopment. While the district awaits the construction of its new transportation center, it is housing its buses in a parking lot near the demolition site.

“We had to contend with all the bus drivers, the buses and routing traffic and make sure there was no dust or debris in the area,” Thomas says. “We worked in the opposite direction of what we had planned in order to make it work. We started with the buildings furthest away and worked our way forward.

To minimize the effects on the school district’s bus drivers, Thomas says the Green City scheduled the loudest, dustiest work for Saturdays and Sundays when school was out of session.

“The bus company was very accommodating,” he says. “They didn’t give us any problem, and they moved their buses and equipment out when needed or would give us a couple of extra parking spaces for distance to maintain a safe working space,” Thomas adds.

On the sustainability front, Green City prioritized the diversion of construction and demolition materials, as well as managed its water use. The contractor used a proprietary filtration system during the abatement process to avoid wasting water and recycled the wood, aluminum, aggregate and electrical equipment.

Priestly says scrap metal recycling also was a priority during the demolition project, with crews working quickly to recover roughly 4,500 tons of scrap to be sold and recycled.

“To ensure the best outcome for the project financially, expediting the demolition to provide scrap revenue made the most sense,” he says.

As for aggregates, Thomas says the project diverted almost 40,000 tons of concrete, which was processed on-site.

“We used [the crushed aggregate] for our own roads on the property to get around, and then, obviously, we sell the recycled material,” he says.

With the P&G campus demo completed, Priestly says the project showcased how well Green City and PDI operators could work together.

“Communication, the engineered plan and a safety-first approach all seem to be aligned,” he says of the companies’ work on the project. “It was a total success.”

Thomas adds that with PDI’s backing, Green City has increased assurance as it begins to bid on larger power plants and industrial facility demolition projects.

The author is associate editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.