Shangri-La tower construction reroutes traffic

Cheryl Rossi
Van. Courier

A crane stationed at the Shangri-La, the city’s tallest tower, will be dismantled this weekend. Photograph by : Photo Jason Lang

The tallest crane in the city will be dismantled slowly and surely from Shangri-La, the city’s tallest tower, this weekend. But for drivers, traffic will be no paradise.

Georgia Street is scheduled to be closed between Burrard and Bute from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Only local traffic can travel east on Georgia to Bute.

“The reason is it’s so windy up there,” said John Clelland, a communications officer with the city for street projects. “They have a cable from the top of the building right down to the road that everything will be sort of anchored to, so if the wind comes, it can sway a little bit, but it’s not going to be falling.”

Parking will be barred from Pender to allow two lanes of traffic in each direction. “They did look at a helicopter option, but it just wasn’t feasible,” said Alan Reese of engineering development services with the city. Using a helicopter would have meant more street closures because the Ministry of Transportation doesn’t want the craft hovering over people.

“[The helicopter] would have done it in pieces, but it just wasn’t feasible because of timelines and how long it’s allowed to hover and how long it takes to dismantle the bolts,” he said.

Dismantling a 700-foot-tall crane isn’t a swift process. In fact, it’s a multi-crane deal.

A mini climber crane will be built on the roof and attached to the side of the 61-storey building. It will remove the main tower crane and lower it down. Once it’s finished, this crane will pull up another side climbing crane, which will dismantle the roof crane and lower it down. Then the final crane will be dismantled and ride down in an elevator.

Reese said watching the crane come down won’t be a scintillating sight. “These movements of this crane, they’re so high, it’s going to take an hour for this crane to lower with weight, and then it still takes an hour for this crane to go back up,” he said. “It’s such a height and this is a very slow-moving apparatus that they’re using.”

Clelland said if everything goes well, Georgia Street could open in the afternoon. “They’ve allowed themselves extra time in case there’s problems or high wind or whatever.”

The lofty crane has been in place for three years while the Shangri-La Hotel has been under construction. A 119-room luxury hotel will occupy the first 15 floors of the tower at Georgia and Thurlow, with live/work condos, a sculpture gallery curated by the Vancouver Art Gallery, high-end retail shops and restaurants included in the mixed-use complex. The hotel is set to open in January.

Developers have to pay for permits, for meters to be hooded to cover parking meter revenue loss, and for police costs. They work out scheduling with the city.

“Because a lot of the developers, they’d like to do it in the middle of the week, and we make them wait until the weekend,” Clelland said. “We just make sure the public’s interests are well taken care of and we’re not getting pushed around by anybody.”

The Courier couldn’t reach Don Weavers of Ledcor Construction Inc., who is co-ordinating the take down. But Reese said he’s likely busy co-ordinating the whole affair. “We have police coming, we have traffic re-routing, we have message boards in North Vancouver, we have message boards in Vancouver,” he said.

Reese couldn’t say how much the crane dismantling will cost the developers, which are Peterson Investment Group and Westbank Projects Corp.

© Vancouver Courier 2008

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Real Estate Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.