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An Iron Mountain Demolition crew removes debris from a home it demolished last month along Mesa Avenue, near the Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. Debris removal accounts for about 90% of any demolition job, according to the company. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
A mountain of debris is left over after an Iron Mountain Demolition crew tore down a home last month along Mesa Avenue, near The Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. Debris removal accounts for about 90% of any demolition job, according to the company. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
Jeremy Cassels a worker for Iron Mountain Demolition sprays water on leftover debris after the company demolished a home last month along Mesa Avenue, near the Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
An Iron Mountain Demolition excavator grabs a pile of building materials that was left over after a crew from the company demolished a home last month along Mesa Avenue, near the Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. Debris removal accounts for about 90% of any demolition job, according to the company. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
Iron Mountain Demolition in Colorado Springs helped tear down the 1960s-era Summit House on the top of Pikes Peak in early 2021. A new visitors center opened on Pikes Peak later in the year. COURTESY CITY OF COLORADO SPRINGS.
An empty Outback Steakhouse, east of Powers Boulevard and Constitution Avenue on Colorado Springs' east side, was torn down in early 2021 to make way for In-N-Out Burger's second restaurant, which was constructed on the site and opened in November of last year. RICH LADEN, THE GAZETTE
An empty Outback Steakhouse, east of Powers Boulevard and Constitution Avenue on Colorado Springs' east side, was torn down in early 2021 to make way for In-N-Out Burger's second restaurant, which was constructed on the site and opened in November of last year. RICH LADEN, THE GAZETTE
The old Sears department store at the Chapel Hills Mall in northern Colorado Springs was demolished last year to make room for a 300-unit apartment complex that's under construction on the site and expected to open in 2023. Empty buildings and those in disrepair sometimes get demolished by developers, retailers and restaurants, who value the ground upon which the outdated structures sit. JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE
An Iron Mountain Demolition crew removes debris from a home it demolished last month along Mesa Avenue, near the Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. Debris removal accounts for about 90% of any demolition job, according to the company. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
A mountain of debris is left over after an Iron Mountain Demolition crew tore down a home last month along Mesa Avenue, near The Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. Debris removal accounts for about 90% of any demolition job, according to the company. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
Jeremy Cassels a worker for Iron Mountain Demolition sprays water on leftover debris after the company demolished a home last month along Mesa Avenue, near the Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
An Iron Mountain Demolition excavator grabs a pile of building materials that was left over after a crew from the company demolished a home last month along Mesa Avenue, near the Broadmoor hotel on Colorado Springs' southwest side. Debris removal accounts for about 90% of any demolition job, according to the company. PARKER SEIBOLD, THE GAZETTE
Iron Mountain Demolition in Colorado Springs helped tear down the 1960s-era Summit House on the top of Pikes Peak in early 2021. A new visitors center opened on Pikes Peak later in the year. COURTESY CITY OF COLORADO SPRINGS.
An empty Outback Steakhouse, east of Powers Boulevard and Constitution Avenue on Colorado Springs' east side, was torn down in early 2021 to make way for In-N-Out Burger's second restaurant, which was constructed on the site and opened in November of last year. RICH LADEN, THE GAZETTE
An empty Outback Steakhouse, east of Powers Boulevard and Constitution Avenue on Colorado Springs' east side, was torn down in early 2021 to make way for In-N-Out Burger's second restaurant, which was constructed on the site and opened in November of last year. RICH LADEN, THE GAZETTE
The old Sears department store at the Chapel Hills Mall in northern Colorado Springs was demolished last year to make room for a 300-unit apartment complex that's under construction on the site and expected to open in 2023. Empty buildings and those in disrepair sometimes get demolished by developers, retailers and restaurants, who value the ground upon which the outdated structures sit. JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE
When Iron Mountain Demolition crews complete their work, they literally have nothing to show for it.
"Our finished product is an empty space," said Dennis Gullion, general manager of Colorado Springs-based Iron Mountain. "It's not like I can take a picture of that and put it on our website, and go, 'wow, look at this.' It's a dirt lot. That's our finished product."
That's the unglamorous reality of the residential and commercial demolition industry. But even if there's scant evidence of their work, local demolition companies have proven to be an instrumental part of the Pikes Peak region's construction and development industry.
Developers, general contractors and homebuilders rely on the proper and safe demolition of an aging house, vacant store or dilapidated commercial building and the removal of debris and materials before new construction can take place on a previously occupied site.
It's work that's more complicated than just pulling up to a job site with an excavator or other piece of heavy equipment and yanking down a structure.
Weeks of planning, obtaining government regulatory approvals, knowing the composition of the structure to be razed, determining a strategy for how to tear it down and understanding the nature of the surrounding property are all key elements of any job.
"It's always the beginning of something new," said David Deighton, Earthwise Demolition owner in the Springs. "It's a very intricate part of what needs to take place by a specialized field. There are trades — mechanical, electrical, plumbing, builders. Demolition is just another one of those trades. But we're the very beginning step of what needs to be cleared so that something can be changed, improved or expanded."
To be sure, most residential and commercial construction takes place on vacant parcels.
But in some neighborhoods, especially in posh areas of town such as the southwest side, property owners might tear down a 1950s-era rancher to put up a large, swanky mansion. Or they might even buy and demolish a neighbor's home to allow them to expand the size of their lot. And after the Waldo Canyon fire in 2012 and the Black Forest fire in 2013, the remains of hundreds of fire-ravaged homes had to be demolished.
On the commercial side, retailers, restaurant chains, apartment developers and the like frequently look to build on sites that are occupied by existing buildings. Those outdated structures might be in disrepair and too expensive to remodel; others stand empty because businesses have moved, downsized or closed altogether.
In any case, the land underneath remains desirable because it might be near a busy intersection, along a highly visible stretch of road or adjacent to a familiar shopping center.
"We have buildings that have gone beyond their life expectancy, their life cycle," said Kevin Murphy, president and co-owner of D2 Demo & Dirt + Utilities. "If you leave those buildings up too long, they become dilapidated, they become places for the homeless and for other people to come in and start fires, strip the structure of any of its copper and value. ... Structures go beyond a life cycle and it costs more money to try and upgrade a real old building. The electrical, the mechanical, the plumbing systems have to be completely and totally updated.
"Sometimes, there's more value in the ground and the land than the structure," he said. "And so it makes sense to take the structure down and repurpose that piece of valuable ground."
Demolition work by Iron Mountain, Earthwise, D2 and several others — in which they typically use sophisticated equipment, including excavators that can cost $250,000 and up — has been steady in recent years. The surge of residential and commercial growth in the Pikes Peak region and the entrance or reentry into the market by national apartment developers and restaurant and retail chains has contributed to the demolition demand.
Some higher profile commercial demolitions in recent years include the Sears store at the Chapel Hills Mall in northern Colorado Springs, which was razed to make way for an apartment complex; a vacant east-side Outback Steakhouse that became home to In-N-Out Burger's second restaurant in the Springs; and a pair of Village Inn restaurants, one of which was replaced by Krispy Kreme Doughnuts on the northeast side and the other on the north side where a car wash is under construction.
Colorado Springs and its Urban Renewal Authority, meanwhile, have designated several areas as redevelopment sites, which has led to building demolitions to clear the way for new land uses. Examples include several buildings that were torn down on downtown's light-industrial southwest side to make room for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum and buildings removed from the 400 block of South Tejon Street in favor of a new Marriott-branded hotel.
In the five years from 2017 to 2021, the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department issued an average of 124.2 building permits each year for the demolition of residential and commercial structures in El Paso County, the agency's records show. After the Great Recession and before the Waldo Canyon fire, demolition permits averaged 65 annually from 2009 to 2011.
Through September of this year, 98 demolition permits already had been issued, or nearly 79% of the previous five-year average total.
A key first step toward obtaining a permit: Qualified contractors must determine whether a building contains asbestos and then building owners must have the material removed if it's found, Gullion said.
Doing so enables a demolition company to obtain a required permit from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which oversees state air pollution laws that regulate asbestos and products containing the cancer-causing material.
Another step in the demolition process requires the shutoff and disconnection of utility lines that extend to a property, Gullion said.
A company that's licensed to perform demolition work must clear those hurdles before it's issued a permit from the Regional Building Department, he said.
The preparation work doesn't stop there.
A demolition company must know the history and makeup of the building that it's about to tear down. What construction materials were used to build the structure, including its walls and roof? What's the thickness and strength of those materials? Is there a concrete foundation underneath?
A demolition company also must determine how the building might fall once preliminary work has taken place inside the structure, said Murphy, of D2 Demo.
His company razed a three-story apartment building on South Nevada Avenue as part of a redevelopment project underway along Nevada and South Tejon Street. Before the demolition took place, the company removed plaster and Sheetrock that took the building down to its studs, Murphy said.
"Now the building is weak, because there isn't all the building products," he said. "Now you've got a structure that potentially could collapse. You have to take than into consideration and you have to be very cautious."
The lay of the land also is important to map out.
A barn being razed in the middle of nowhere isn't much of a problem, Murphy said. But in town, a demolition company needs to determine if ripping down a building might damage a structure next door, while also being aware of the presence of overhead power lines and other potential obstructions.
The three-story apartment building torn down by D2 was about 25 feet away from a South Nevada Avenue gas station. The company put up fencing and lined it with metal containers that acted as barriers to prevent building materials from falling onto the station, Murphy said.
"It takes a lot of skill," he said. "It's not something that you just go in and smash it."
Even positioning the demolition equipment was a challenge, said Danny Mientka, the developer of the 50,000-square-foot Creekwalk retail project northwest of Nevada and Cheyenne Road, for which Murphy's company tore down a total of 32 buildings over three years.
Murphy's company created a dirt mound next to the apartment building that allowed its wrecking equipment to climb high enough before it then clawed open the building's roofline, Mientka said.
The demolition crew — with Murphy's son, Kelly, in the cab of the equipment tearing down the building — then pushed and leaned the building so that it would fall the right way and not onto the gas station next door, Mientka said.
"That thing fell down like it had been dynamited," he said. "Once the roof was weakened enough, the walls just sort of fell in on themselves. It was picture perfect and it was a great sigh of relief with his father, Kevin, standing right there. We had to sweep up the islands around the gasoline pumps, which we did very quickly. But mission accomplished."
At any demolition site, safety for workers and surrounding areas is the top priority, said Jim Johnson, owner of Springs-based GE Johnson Construction Co. The general contractor is one of the largest in the Rocky Mountains; it performs some of its own demolition work in addition to hiring third-party companies as subcontractors.
"There's a lot of reverse structural engineering that really needs to take place, understanding ... what is holding up what so that you don't accidentally take out a column or a support duct and have the building fall in an unintended way or area," Johnson said.
Demolition jobs, meanwhile, aren't just about razing a structure. At Iron Mountain, Gullion said the actual teardown accounts for about 10% of the time for any job, while 90% of the work involves cleaning up and hauling away debris afterward. Iron Mountain has its own fleet of trucks for debris removal, he said.
"It's easy to get a building on the ground," Gullion said. "It's extremely time consuming to get it out of there. That's where all the time is spent."
Despite preparation work, demolition companies still run into surprises. Sometimes blueprints and other information that spell out a building's design and the type of materials used in its construction are wrong or incomplete.
At the Wells Fargo Bank Tower on Cascade Avenue in downtown Colorado Springs, Iron Mountain recently completed a "selective" demolition job — the industry term used to describe the surgical removal of a portion of a structure to accommodate a remodeling or other new use without taking down an entire building.
In this case, Gullion said, Iron Mountain was hired to remove a second-floor vault for Wells Fargo, which had shut down its customer banking services in the building after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago.
Drawings showed the vault walls were made of 8-inch concrete, which would have allowed workers to use a low-labor, remote controlled robot-like machine to break up the material, Gullion said.
But when workers got inside the vault, they found its walls encased in metal panels, not concrete. Those panels, in turn, were filled with aging wood that Gullion suspected had been added as a noise buffer.
When no concrete was found, Iron Mountain shifted to a more labor-intensive, costlier plan to cut out the metal panels, Gullion said. And because of the presence of the wood, crews removing the panels had to safeguard against creating sparks, which could have ignited the wood and the rest of the building, he said.
"It was completely different than what we thought going into it," he said.
At the Creekwalk shopping center site, Mientka said Murphy's demolition crews were surprised when a piece of equipment digging in a field in front of some multifamily buildings grabbed onto the corner of an underground swimming pool that had been covered over by dirt and grass.
"He didn't expect it to be there and we didn't know it was there," Mientka said. "That had to be dug out. That's one of those surprises that everybody has to figure out how to pay for."
Business writer, Colorado Springs Gazette
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