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	Listed Building Case Study Breaking of Re-enforced Concrete inside a 13th century, listed, timber framed, manor house. We were contacted by the new property owner who was in the process of upgrading and stabilising the existing building. He informed us that he had a problem with some re-enforced concrete that had been poured inside one corner of the manor house to stop the building subsiding. The new owner wanted to remove this floor and put in proper foundations directly under the timber walls. However his jack hammers had little affect on the concrete and he wanted to know if explosives could be used to break up the 300mm (1 foot) thick re-enforced floor without damaging the structure of the listed building. We visited the property and found a corner room 5.2 metres by 5.4 metres with a small window in one wall and a large window making up almost of one of the other walls, there was also an old brick chimney that needed to remain untouched.


	We offered to carry out a small test firing to demonstrate our capabilities, as such we drilled three boreholes and placed a single ten gram plastic explosive charges in each hole along with a electric delay detonator.

	On firing the property owner was impressed to find that we had successfully broken 0.6 square metre (6 square feet) of the 300mm (1 foot) thick floor without damaging the oak wall beams that were just 300mm (1 foot) away from the closest explosive charge.

	We were then invited to break up the entire re-enforced concrete floor, which was achieved by combining micro-blasting techniques and quarry shotfiring theory, we fired consecutive rows of explosives charges at 25 millisecond intervals to rapidly break the re-enforced flooring, stripping the concrete clean off of the steel mesh re-enforcing.

	We soon discovered that the re-enforced flooring hid a heavily re-enforced beam under it, which was over 1 metre thick in places. The property owner asked if we could break this beam as it was blocking the area where he needed to excavate in order to install the new foundations.

	We drilled larger holes into the beam and fired a series of 30 gram charges which reduced the concrete to loose rubble, leaving the re-enforcing rods clean and capable of being reused.

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