Demo Work Getting Underway On SCSU’s Holes Hall

ST. CLOUD - The demolition of Holes Hall at St. Cloud State University will be getting underway in earnest this week.

Dan Pederson is the Director of Residential Life. He says they've been doing a lot of interior demo work over the past couple of weeks.

We've removed all the hazardous materials through the abatement process. We're begining the shutdown of utilities. The elevator has been removed. And now we're essentially gutting the interior of recyclable materials.

Pederson says the heavy equipment will be arriving on campus this week. Most of the deconstruction will be done by the time the students return on August 18th, but there will be some finishing work that will last into November.

It will be a slow process, not the implosion that some may be expecting.

We're going to begin by pulverizing the columns that support the entire building, and move floor by floor. That will fall to the deck, the materials will be removed, and then we'll move to the next floor.

Pederson says Holes Hall is the first of potentially several to be removed from campus over the next several years, including Stearns and Mitchell Halls.

They're basically sequenced right now together. Neither one of the buildings are in the long term plan. If we remove Mitchell Hall and replace it with a brand new building on that campus footprint, then we would need Stearns as swing space. So it might be Mitchell that gets torn down first.