Preparation cost shot up by 20% due to robustness of Noida twin towers: Edifice Engineering

"Our contract with Supertech for the demolition of the twin towers was for Rs 18 crore....Our preparation cost shot up by at least 20 per cent due to the addition of four extra blast floors — two each in the two towers," said Jigar Chheda, partner at Edifice.

Explaining why they added four extra floors, Chheda said that during the test blast conducted on April 10 at 2:30 pm at Apex tower, they found out that the building was more robust than anticipated.

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"We (Edifice and Jet) had a joint meeting after the test blast where Joe Brinkmann said that we need to redesign some plans. Then we added some blast floors. Adding any additional floors cost us a lot as it needed drilling, more explosives and geotextile fibre, among other things. Thus, the cost of demolition was more than what we had expected," said Chheda.

He said that the earlier plan was to have nine primary blast floors in each of the towers, but that increased to 11 floors due to the robustness of the building. There were seven secondary blast floors in each tower.

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Edifice used around 3,700 kg of explosives to raze the buildings. According to Edifice Engineering Chief Financial Officer Alpesh Gala, they invested over Rs 13 crore in the project till August 26. Noida twin towers were demolished on August 28 and what is left at the site is 80,000 tonnes of debris.

Edifice expects to recover around Rs 15 crore from disposing of the scrap extracted from the debris.

Uttkarsh Mehta, another partner at Edifice said that the Central Building Research Institute (CBRI) placed black boxes inside the building and the data recorded by these instruments will yield more details about the demolition, like collapsing speed, rotation, etc. Mehta confirmed that the boundary-wall and some glass windows of ATS Village were damaged and will be repaired accordingly.

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Edifice Engineering brought down the towers in collaboration with South Africa-based Jet Demolitions. Joe Brinkmann, CEO and MD of Jet, said that they never worked on a structure as robust as the Noida twin towers — Apex and Ceyan. While Apex was 102 metres tall with 32 floors, the 97-metre tall Ceyane had 29 floors.