The search for the bodies of three men who died when a power station in south Oxfordshire partially collapsed is set to continue this morning after the remainder of the building was demolished.
Four demolition contractors died when a boiler room building at the Didcot Power Station unexpectedly collapsed on 23 February.
Only one body, that of Michael Collings, 53, has been recovered so far.
Ken Cresswell, 57, and John Shaw, 61, both from Rotherham, South Yorkshire and Chris Huxtable, 34, from Swansea, are still missing under 20,000 tonnes of rubble.
It is still unknown what the causes of the tragedy were.
The building - which was due for demolition when it partially collapsed - became too unstable to be approached by rescue workers and a 50-metre exclusion zone was set up around the site.
A remote demolition brought down the remainder of the decommissioned site shortly before 6am, in a unique operation that made use of 10 remote-controlled robots.
Teams will now be deployed to resume searching the remnants of the plant.
Roland Alford, who is the explosives contractor at the power station, said the four-month delay in completing the demolition was necessary on safety grounds.
He said: "There has been quite a lot of criticism about delays, questioning why it has taken so long to get to this point, but the fact is nothing like this has ever been attempted before and this is not a simple demolition.
"We have been working on it night and day since March and built up quite a sizeable team of very expert people to work on this, to come up with the charges, the methods of doing it and training."
He added: "It was almost unthinkable to send people to work underneath there and place charges, given the fact the building could come down at any moment - you legally can't justify that."
Roads and trains were halted in the surrounding area while the demolition took place.
No comments:
Post a Comment