NEW ORLEANS — A laborious process of slicing, torching and picking away massive hunks of concrete to extract the remains of two workers killed at the Hard Rock Hotel collapse site is a central mission in a proposed $8.4 million demolition plan that the city released publicly Monday and could approve any day now.
It could still be another month after the city issues demolition permits, however, for that “evidence and body recovery” phase to start.
And under a timeline submitted by developer 1031 Canal Development LLC, the full Hard Rock teardown could be wrapping up in October, right at the year anniversary of a hotel construction collapse that killed three workers.
Contractor Kolb Grading and specialist Marschel Wrecking, both out of Missouri, have six months to finish the demolition under their contract with the developer.
The schedule they submitted to the city has them leaving a clean, secure site behind at Canal and North Rampart on Sept. 29. But that assumed the city would have already signed off on the demolition more than a week ago, on April 17.
Orleans Parish Civil District Judge Kern Reese is asking the city for a verdict Wednesday on whether Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration will accept the developer’s latest plan and approve permits after months of lurching attempts to agree on either a conventional demolition or an implosion.
The city is being advised on engineering questions by Manafort Brothers, a 101-year-old New England family construction firm owned by the family of President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is now in prison on conspiracy and witness-tampering convictions connected to his work for a pro-Russian former president of Ukraine.
Paul Manafort's late father once owned the company with his brothers and it's now owned by his cousins, who have sought to distance themselves from him.
The plan being hammered out now is a modified and more detailed version of a conventional demolition that the developer proposed as early as November. In January, New Orleans Fire Department Superintendent Tim McConnell viewed the plan presented then as too dangerous.
Some of the city’s concerns, including plans to shore adjacent building walls and a stronger focus on retrieval of two workers’ remains, appear to be addressed in the more detailed plans. City officials declined to compare the plans Monday, saying they would withhold comment until their review was complete, but the November plan gave only five days to retrieve the bodies instead of 30 days. The earlier plan only mentioned using three neighboring builders owned by 1031 Canal Development’s principals Mohan Kailas and Todd Trosclair as a staging area for demolition of the Hard Rock Hotel, while the latest plan explicitly proposes demolishing those buildings, too.
Cantrell has placed a high priority on safely recovering the remains of Jose Ponce Arreola, 63, and Quinnyon Wimberly, 36. Both men were working on the upper tiers of the 18-story hotel project on the morning of Oct. 12, when they collapsed.
A third worker, Anthony Magrette, 49, also was killed. Magrette was on a lower floor. His body was recovered the day after the Oct. 12 catastrophe.
Instead of sending demolition workers into the mangled wreckage to take down the building piece by piece, as proposed by competing conventional demolition contractors, the Kolb plan made public by the city on Monday calls for more distance.
“We may use robots or a man basket positioned at a safe distance using shears, pulverizers, torches, and high-reach equipment to free loose concrete and steel from the remaining intact structural frame,” the plan reads.
Efforts to recover the remains would begin at North Rampart and Iberville streets, where officials identified one of the bodies amid the wreckage above the blocked-off street, and move toward Burgundy Street.
Wide cantilever slabs would be removed as contractors and a government rescue team coordinate on an extraction plan. Under its contract, Kolb Grading is not responsible for “directly” handling human remains.
“The Kolb team will support the local authorities as needed including the use of heavy equipment to lift, lower, and remove debris and obstructions and providing man baskets to accomplish the recovery,” the plan reads.
That body recovery would not be the first task, however. It has been labeled a 30-day priority for “Phase B” of a demolition that would begin with the removal of a tower crane that collapsed onto the roof of the mangled hotel.
The contractor considers that crane as “the biggest threat to our workers and our neighbors.”
That first phase also includes the controversial demolition of three buildings, two with Canal Street addresses and one on Iberville Street, to create a debris “drop zone” for the teardown.
The body recovery would take place alongside the removal of steel structures, followed by removal of the top 10 steel-and-concrete floors by letting them fall down onto the lower eight floors, a concrete base originally designed as a parking garage.
Another two months will be spent demolishing and hauling off those bottom eight floors. That all could be done by October if the city approves the demolition permit this week.
Still, the city continued its sparring with the 1031 Canal Development in court, as it seeks to hold the developer’s feet to the fire by enforcing a recent code-enforcement judgment deeming the hotel an enduring blight, and a demand for the developer to pony up $5 million in a bond.
Attorneys for the developer have argued that the city is trying to place it in a “trick bag,” shirking fault for a series of aborted demolition plans.
On Monday, the city accused the developer of creating “delay after delay, shifting from one plan to the next while focusing on how cheaply it could accomplish the demolition.”
That kind of rancor is a bad sign for a project that has only grown more urgent with time, said University of New Orleans engineering professor Norma Jean Mattei.
We have a lot less traffic to deal with, a lot less people on the streets,” she said. “So this is the time to get after it. As long as they have a safe plan!”
Judge Reese gave the developers until Monday to answer the city's technical questions. A hearing over the demolition permit is slated for Wednesday.
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