Concrete Removal in New York City

What Breakara takes out

Interior slabs and toppings, basement and cellar floors, footings and foundation walls, exterior walkways, patios, steps, curb cuts and driveways, equipment pads, and the odd stair or retaining element that came with the property and no longer suits it.

Where reinforcement is in the pour, we cut it rather than dragging it. Rebar left hanging off a broken edge is how the next trade gets hurt, and a mesh mat pulled out in one sheet takes the edge of the slab with it.

Where the concrete is only partly coming out, we cut the line before anything is broken. A slab broken back to a ragged edge and then patched stays visible forever. One that was cut first does not.

Sidewalks, and the notice that usually starts the job

Most sidewalk work in New York starts with a piece of paper rather than a decision. The city holds the property owner responsible for maintaining, repairing and installing the sidewalk next to their property, and the Department of Transportation issues a violation when a flag is cracked, hollow underneath, out of level, missing a piece, sloped the wrong way, or carrying protruding hardware.

That notice gives an owner 75 days. If the defect is still there when the 75 days are up, DOT can carry out the work itself and bill the owner for it. That last part is the one people find out about late.

Breakara does the removal. We take out the flags that have to go, saw the line first where only part of a run is coming up so the remaining concrete has a clean edge to meet, and carry the broken material away under the same rules that govern the rest of our debris.

Removal and replacement are two different jobs, and the new pour carries its own sidewalk construction permit. If you are working to a violation date, have the replacement lined up before the old concrete comes out. A sidewalk that has been taken up and then waits is a worse problem than the one you started with, and the clock does not stop while it sits.

Weight is the constraint nobody plans for

Concrete is heavy out of all proportion to its volume, and it is the reason concrete jobs go wrong in ways interior jobs do not.

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  The floor you are standing on

  An interior slab has to leave through a building whose floors and elevator have ratings. We size and stage material to those ratings rather than piling it wherever there is room, and on an upper floor that is the whole logistics problem.

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  The route out

  Pieces are cut to what the stair, door or hoist actually takes. Sizing to the route is the difference between carrying and dragging, and dragging is what damages the protection somebody paid for.

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  The container

  A loaded container reaches a legal weight long before it reaches a full one. Concrete jobs are priced on tonnage and trips, not on how much space the debris occupies, and a container that looks half empty may already be done.

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  Where a truck can stand

  Kerbside space, driveway width, overhead clearance and how far the material has to be moved by hand before it reaches the truck. This is the line that separates a Staten Island driveway from a Queens side street. That arithmetic is done before the first cut, because discovering it halfway through is what turns a two-day job into a week.

What is under it

Two questions come before any slab is broken, and both are cheaper to ask than to answer later.

First, what is in it. Conduit, radiant heating pipe, plumbing runs and post-tension cable have all turned up in slabs nobody expected to contain them. Where drawings exist we read them. Where they do not, we make the first opening carefully rather than confidently.

Second, what is beneath it. Fill, an older slab, a void, or a footing doing something for the structure above. A slab removed without knowing what it was bearing on is how a job stops being a demolition job and starts being a structural one.

Questions about concrete removal