Decision Making / 3 / 3.1

3.1 EVENTS GONE SO HORRIBLY WRONG

The Australian Broadcasting Commission’s (ABC’s) 7:30 Report on Monday 14 July 1997 reported (ABC, 1997):

‘[Dateline Canberra, Australian Capital Territory] …It was only at the last minute when they were on their way home from Mass that the Bender family decided to stop by Lake Burley Griffin to watch the implosion of the city’s historic hospital. They took up a vantage point 480 metres away from the site, but 12-year-old Katie Bender was hit by debris and killed instantly. Now the city wants to know how seemingly straightforward demolition job could go so wrong, so wrong that one thick piece of metal over half a metre in length flew across traffic and shaved gashes in trees a full kilometre from the hospital site. [The demolition by implosion] was billed as a ‘family spectacular’ by the ACT Government, but it ended with bricks and steel raining down on spectators injuring nine and killing one young girl who was watching from an apparently safe distance.’

[Prime Minister of Australia, Mr John Howard, commented]: ‘not only is it a personal tragedy for the family of that little girl, but it is one of those unexpected and unsettling, extraordinary events’…

[Federal Police Commissioner, Bill Stoll, commented]: ‘the scene, as you would appreciate is still very unstable… we secured that as an incident scene last night’… ‘Today the city remains completely baffled as to what went wrong. Three investigations have been launched, and the company which chose the tenderers is adamant that safety guidelines were followed…’

Michael Sullivan, Totalcare ACT: ‘You would normally expect that with an implosion, and from the test implosions that were done by the implosion contractor that the maximum movement away from the location of the explosion was five metres… You would normally expect no material to be outside the 50 metre exclusion zone.’

Eleanor Hall (ABC): ‘The project team manager did confirm that the winning bid was the cheapest but would not be drawn on how much cheaper… [explaining that he did not consider the price to be the key criterion.]’ Eleanor Hall (ABC):‘One of the rival tenderers stated that imploding this building was never going to be the safest option, because [the demolition] would require too much explosive power…’

Con Petropoulos, Delta: ‘This particular building was not exceptionally high, but [was] quite strong… from my understanding of the building, the building was quite strong on the inside … [it was a] very strong reinforced building… it took quite a lot of charge to bring it to the ground.’

Eleanor Hall (ABC): ‘An interview [with Tony Fenwick, Site Supervisor, City and Country Demolitions] a week earlier suggests that the amount of explosives used might be an important clue…’

Tony Fenwick, Site Supervisor, City and Country Demolitions: ‘…we [Rod McCracken, the shot-firer, and I] got a bit of a surprise when we exposed the concrete off the steel columns, just the heaviness in the gauge of the steel [was a real surprise] … its just a matter of Rod changing the settings of the delays and the size of the charges to handle that.’

Eleanor Hall (ABC): ‘One question that is mystifying everybody is why the ACT Government turned the demolition of a building into a public spectacle.’

Kate Carnell, ACT Chief Minister: ‘I think you have to look at it [just] how important that site is for Canberra. It was a hospital for about 50 years. It was the only hospital in Canberra for a very long time. So, it was a very important part of Canberra’s history.’

Eleanor Hall (ABC): ‘You put out a press release specifying the best vantage points … You went on radio talking about it. You know that explosives [especially in such large quantity] are dangerous anyway, why encourage people to be around them?’

Kate Carnell, ACT Chief Minister: ‘If we thought there was any danger in this, of course we would not have gone ahead. We would not have let Totalcare [Industries] or the demolition people [City and Country Demolotions] go ahead. Remember, the risk assessment told us that the exclusion zone needed to be 50 metres away. There is not even a small chance, as it was put to us, that there was any danger at all. Now if there was no danger, people were inevitably going to be down the lake to watch it happen, it was important that there be crowd control to ensure people were in the right spot to see the demolition.’

Eleanor Hall (ABC): ‘I don’t think any sensible person could say when you have high-powered explosives, you have no danger. Your Government took a political decision to actually promote this as a spectacle, as a carnival… there were fireworks to invite the public to be there… why?’

Kate Carnell, ACT Chief Minister: ‘I disagree totally. There was no indication that there was any danger. Remember, implosions are when a building falls in on its own footprint. It is not an explosion where you would expect any debris whatsoever. In fact, the contractor who did this had indicated to us… remember he has done over 200 of these, that he has never had debris even smash a window.... Something went tragically wrong here, and we need to get to the bottom of it… because we did comply, as I am told, with Australian Standards… we did comply with Worksafe Standards and something still went wrong.’

(By permission of the 7:30 Report and the ABC. (c) Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.)