The first thing that struck me was the size and power of the machine they were using. I noted its model number and looked it up afterward, and what I was watching was actually a Kobelco 235SR LC Short Radius Hydraulic Excavator. You can find lots of information about it here<\/a>, but what really amazed me as I was looking at it was the sheer power of the thing, especially the arm. This is what the arm did (under the skill of an obviously skilled and experienced driver): first it gripped a wall (using an opposable thumblike attachment attached to the bucket head), and then ripped it from the rest of the house<\/em>. Then, the bucket obliterated everything (floors, rooms) behind where the wall was. Then, the operator used the bucket to tamp down the just-entropied materials into a ramp. Then the excavator drove onto the newly created excavator-roadway, and just by mashing the arm into the ground<\/em>, raised the front of the excavator off the ground<\/em>, allowing it to turn in place<\/em> and start all over again.<\/p>\n 23,200<\/strong>, ladies and gentlemen. From the Kobelco website, that’s the digging force, in pounds, of this arm. This means that when the arm pushes on something, it pushes on it with a force of over 11 tons<\/em>. Just watching it work, it was obvious the excavator could easily flip itself over just using the downward force of the arm.<\/p>\n By the time I got there (at around 4:30) half the house was gone. I took these first two pictures (mmm…grainy PDA<\/abbr> photos) at around 5 PM:<\/p>\n By 5:30, it looked like this.<\/p>\n Absolutely amazing. It was like watching my childhood Tonka truck dreams come to life. It was so cool I stayed until the house was complete rubble. A couple of other people stayed for a few minutes, but no one else stayed as long as I did. Lightweights<\/em>.<\/p>\n The only thing that marred the whole experience was that I kept wondering if the police would stop by and tell me to move along, because even watching a public event these days feels like the kind of thing that can put one on an FBI watch list. I realize that there must be a balance between freedom and security, but the pendulum has swung too far. Hopefully it’ll swing back soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I watched the demolition of a house today. It was unequivocally awesome. Two WVU students were sent to the hospital recently when the roof on which they were sitting collapsed. This focused a bunch of attention on the state of off-campus student housing, and as a result property inspectors are out in force; fines are … Continue reading House Demolition<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-school","tag-demolition"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1rmW5-o","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Excavator\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/excavator1.jpg?resize=320%2C256&ssl=1\" "\\"Excavator\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Closeup](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/excavator2.jpg?resize=320%2C256&ssl=1\" "\\"Excavator")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Demolished](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jonathankmack.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/excavator3.jpg?resize=320%2C256&ssl=1\" "\\"Demolition")
<\/a><\/p>\n