Just last Thursday, June 10th, 2010, the demolition of a building in Vancouver took a turn for the worst when, twice in the same day, the “professionals” behind the demolition sent entire brick walls falling into the streets. The collapsed walls destroyed city property and narrowly missing workers, pedestrians and drivers. The whole debacle was captured from various angles by onlookers and posted on YouTube.

This video shows the first collapse, as a second-story wall falls to the sidewalk, damaging a streetlight and stunning a woman driving black Volvo while stopped at the intersection.

The same collapse, viewed from above in a taller building, shows the proximity of construction flaggers who had to scurry away to avoid getting hit with debris.

Later that day, the demolition continued on the remaining wall. (Notice the still-dangling streetlight damaged in the first incident.) This wall buckles and falls onto the sidewalk, crushing fences, two newspaper boxes and sends an entire street lamp pole crashing into the street where cars were passing only seconds before!

The second wall collapse, taken by another bystander:

At this time the demolition site has been closed pending further investigation. The building in question was Vancouver’s William Davis Centre for Acting Development, which was being demolished by a company called Global Excavation and Demolition to make way for new condominiums. They may want to consider building a school for construction demolition safety instead.

Local Vancouver news outlets have more on the story:
The Vancouver Sun
The Province
CBC News

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If you watch enough movies and TV, you’ve probably watched many scenes where an actor is reading a newspaper over his morning cup of joe. What you may not have noticed is that they are rarely reading a real newspaper. Instead, the blog slashfilm.com has noticed that many of them have been reading the exact same newspaper since the 80s!

The story behind the prop is still unknown, but it was probably made long ago for filmmakers to avoid copyright issues from using real newspapers. However, the whole situation comes full circle when comparing shots of actor Ed O’Neill reading the newspaper over two decades ago, portraying Al Bundy in Married… with Children, and more recently, as Jay Pritchett in ABC’s Modern Family.

Check out the SlashFilm post for a full collage of images of the newspaper in everything from the film No Country For Old Men to the TV comedy Scrubs.

LOL: The Reoccurring Prop Newspaper [slashfilm.com]

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