Imploding an In-Ground Pool

Pool School: Get a Bigger Hammer.

This story is mostly about knowing when to bring in the heavy equipment. From the start, Andy Martin and Dan Allsup figured they’d need to use Dan’s backhoe to demolish Andy’s in-ground pool. In the end they added an important piece of equipment to the arsenal: a heavy-duty, tractor-mounted jackhammer.

The decision to restore the pool area to a backyard came partly because the owners were now empty-nesters. With their youngest finally off to college, what had been for many summers a very busy pool had become unused and in dis-repair. Bids for repairs ran into the thousands. The idea of having a backyard was looking more appealing all the time.

Tearing out a well-built, in-ground pool would prove to be no picnic, but the guys came armed with a willingness to rent enough hardware to do the job.

Disconnecting and digging up the piping between the pool house and pool was pretty straightforward. Digging up the concrete deck around the pool didn’t pose much of a challenge either. It was when they hit the wall that they, well, hit a wall.

No amount of pulling, pushing, scraping or digging was going to get this done. There was talk about a 90-pound jackhammer, which would have worked but would have been a lot of work. If you’ve ever used one on flat ground, you know they are a load to handle. If you’ve ever used one on vertical work, you can probably still feel it.

That’s when Dan suggested they bring in a piece of equipment with a hydraulic hammer attachment. It was a pretty tight area, but having the jackhammer on a backhoe boom was well worth the hassles of removing some fencing to get the machine into position.

Getting a bigger hammer is not the only thing the guys learned about busting up pools. The jackhammer bit needed to be nearly perpendicular to the very hard, old concrete walls. This presented a challenge for the machine-mounted jackhammer because of maneuverability. They solved this dilemma by filling one end of the pool as a support for the tractor, which produced the angles needed.

Here’s how they got the job done.

Demolition, Step by Step

Using the backhoe to dig out the backfill from around the outside of the pool proved to be a good strategy for getting the right angles for the jackhammer once the tractor was inside the pool. Operator Dan Allsup stockpiled the topsoil at one end of the yard to be used later.