In two months, the demolition of the old Eaton’s department store on Portage Avenue will be complete and the construction of the MTS Centre will begin. The removal of the massive one hundred year old building and the various structures that were added to it down through the decades is now more than 30% finished.
In the past week, all of the excavation equipment was moved down to the seventh floor of the building. The entire eighth floor and everything that stood above it is now gone. Approximately 30% of the ceiling of the seventh floor was taken down this week. Parts of the exterior wall of the seventh floor along the Portage Avenue front of the building were also removed.
Large excavators have now demolished more than 25% of the steel frame and concrete slab construction of the annex building. The entire annex is scheduled disappear in the next week of activity. Once the annex has been removed, that area of the site will provide work crews with a large flat staging area to more quickly sort reusable materials (steel and metals and crushed concrete) from the rubble and speed work toward clearing the entire block for construction to begin in January.
According to the demolition strategy approved by the City of Winnipeg, each of the top three floors are being removed from the top down, one at a time. The larger excavators, working from the ground up, will bring the remaining structure down one bay of the building at a time when demolition reaches the fifth floor.
Consult the True North website (www.truenorthproject.mb.ca) for up to date still photographs of the demolition activity. Contact True North for permission to reprint any of the posted demolition photos or to request other images of the demolition activity.
[MTS Centre Construction Demolition Archive]
