Major Sections of the Old St. Cloud Tech High School Started to Come Down on Wednesday

(KNSI) – Major sections of the old St. Cloud Tech High School started to come down on Wednesday.

Aaron Wendlandt is a project manager with Landwehr Construction, who is overseeing the teardown. He explained that part of the building will be gone, but pieces of it will live on elsewhere.

Jake Judd (KNSI News)

“We’re going to start by peeling all the brick off the outside of the building, so we can recycle the concrete. We’ll be picking through, taking all the steel out of the building to recycle that. Once we get going into the building, we start getting into the concrete, pulling all the rebar out, recycling that.” Wendlandt says the concrete can either be crushed on site and used for fill underneath parking lots, or it will be sent out to another place for crushing.

Wendlandt estimates 10,000 tons of concrete and brick that will come out of the building, and it will take roughly six weeks for the teardown, clean up, and to get the footings in the ground because “we take our time to do a very good job at recycling. We try to recycle. This building here will probably be about 75% recycled, so it’s slow, but it’s clean when we’re done.”

Tearing down part of a building like Tech isn’t as simple as just bringing in the wrecking ball.

“This one here, the big challenge was there were two skyways that connected the two buildings, and there’s two tunnels that connect. So we have to do clean disconnects on them, salvage the existing building that’s staying without doing any damage to it.”