NEW ORLEANS — City leaders had hoped the Hard Rock would come down sometime this month. But on Tuesday, they said that will not happen.
“We’ve lost that sort of mid-March window. So it’s moving backward,” City Hall spokesman Beau Tidwell said during a weekly press briefing. “Probably April is the most likely right now.”
He said the delays not only are due to 1031 Canal Development, the building’s owner, and D.H. Griffin, the demolition contractor, needing to agree on a demolition plan.
The city and state must now finalize their own insurance plans as part of the implosion, Tidwell said, even if 1031 Canal is expected to pay for the implosion.
“That makes negotiation for that contract more complicated certainly than I would like, but it’s legally what has to happen to make sure everything that’s happening is happening correctly,” Tidwell said.
The partially-constructed Hard Rock Hotel collapsed the morning of Oct. 12, killing three people and injuring dozens more. A cause remains under investigation, but an initial report from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is expected by mid-April.
Two cranes that were above the 18-story building were imploded on Oct. 20, days after the collapse.
But since then, plans to remove the rest of the building have swayed back and forth between traditional demolition and a controlled implosion. The dates have also shifted from late in 2020 to this spring.
But with French Quarter Fest and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on the calendars, the city must also factor in those events.
“We’d initially said mid-March (for the implosion),” Tidwell said. “Obviously that’s our preference. So the closer we can get to that the better.
Tidwell said work continues on the site, even if a demolition date is not yet set, and he said photos shot Monday of people inside of the building and on its upper floors are people who have been escorted in by search-and-rescue teams and the New Orleans Fire Department.
“People that are insurers, plaintiffs, defendants -- everybody that’s part of all the litigation that’s going on, they have an ability to insert folks into that site,” Tidwell said.
He said work to remove the two bodies still buried in the rubble cannot happen.
“There’s a difference between sending people in to make these inspections in a guided way on the 14th floor than there is in the, frankly, heavy lift of shifting that debris in a very delicate situation in a way that could potentially put more lives at risk,” Tidwell said.
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