Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 18/02) - In just a few days the old Canadian Tire building will be no more.

Construction workers have painstakingly dismantled the building's innards for the past six weeks, extracting about 90 per cent of the building's weight to be reused.

Chunks of concrete and asphalt will be used as stable fill. Boilers and furnaces will be resold. Old boards will be nailed back up into new structures. Glass doors will open into different interiors.

The insides of the structure, built in 1944, have been scraped out and exposed to the outside world in surprisingly good form. Yellowknife's dry environment means that lengths of wood not bristling with nails are remarkably intact and rot free.

This is what green demolition looks like -- a project that cost the federal government $394,000 and left the building in the hands of Alberta-based McColman and Sons Demolition. Any cash they make from selling recovered goods is theirs to keep.

Green demolition costs more in hard cash than traditional methods. But it's also "a more responsible way," says Mark Cronk, a senior project manager with public works and government services Canada.

A second backhoe arrived on site Monday, and the building will be torn down this week. Then the parking lot will be unearthed and the entire area left as a graded gravel bed.

What happens from there is unknown. The federal government doesn't know what or when it will build. Until then, the site will remain empty, guarded by fencing and waiting for new life.