Allan Appel Photo
A three-family house came crashing down Thursday at the corner of Sherman and George streets.
It was not an accident, nor a disaster. Nor was the structure historic. No one had lived in it for ten years.
The demolition makes way for Habitat for Humanity to build an affordable new home there.
Still, to this reporter, watching the demolition had its wistful moments.
For everywhere you looked at the vanishing half-structure, there were radiators and old sinks — signs of previous habitation — already or about to be crunched up by the ten-ton John Deere excavator that was busy at work all day.
The equipment belonged to Vaughan Gaither (pictured) of the National Excavating and Wrecking Service of Wethersfield.
The-12-year veteran of knocking down structures looked on as his operator in the excavator ate up parts of the old house.
The buiilding had been used a decade ago for doctors’ and other administrative offices by nearby Hospital of St. Raphael, now merged with Yale-New Haven Hospital, said Steven Dicks, who stood on the other side of the of the corner lot, fenced in and overseen by a police officer.
Dicks, the director of programs and energy management at Petra Construction of North Haven, was supervising the demolition by the National Excavating Crew.
He said the building was not historic, had not been lived in for a long time. Abatement had been completed several weeks before. Otherwise his company would not have been given the go-ahead for the tear-down.
Several numbers written on the doors, high above and now exposed in the cross section, were the signs that inspectors had come through and attended to any hazardous material, he said.
“I’ve been advised the hospital is going to give the 5,000 square building lot to Habitat for Humanity,” he said.
The demolition crew arrived early in the morning Thursday. In two hours about half the house was yanked down in chunks by the mouth or what is called the scissors of the excavator, Dicks said.
Then the scissors took its time before taking a bite of the next piece, crunching the debris so that it could be packed into dump trucks densely and securely with no air pockets.
Incoming days drivers of dump trucks, 11 strong in waves of seven Friday and perhaps five the following day, will haul away the crunched-up material for disposal, Dicks said.
Dicks was unsentimental about the tear-down: “We’re a general contractor. We like to build more than demolish. This is part of the process.”
To keep down the dust Gaither hosed the debris with water from a small tank truck that had just filled up at the hydrant down George Street.
Gaither said these jobs never get boring, even after years of performing them.
“It’s like a little kid when you’re running an excavator,” he said. “It’s like playing with your Tonka Trucks when you were little.”
Dicks said that the approximately ten tons of debris should all be gone in about a week and the lot ready for its next life.