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History of the Denny Hill Demolition Co.
1897 - 1934: The Early Years
The Denny Hill Demolition Co. was founded in 1897 by
co-founders Christopher Blankley and Kurt Giessel
to begin demolition of Seattle's Denny Hill. The
earliest attemps were following a plan devised by
Chief Engineer Don Coats Jr. to hollow out the core
of the hill by tunneling in from all four sides
using hand tools and 400 Irish immigrants. This
however met with disasterous failure in 1899 when a
massive cave-in killed all but 3 of the workers.
Amung the survivors was Denny Hill's intern, Brian
O'Bannon.
A Second attempt on the hill began in the spring of
1914 shortly after Don Coats was released from
prision. This time he decided to try a method he
had read about durring his unfortunate incarseration.
The plan called for the use of large steam shovels
to remove the dirt from the hill starting from the
top, load it into trucks and dump it on Orting some
40 miles south. Once again the demolition attempts
came to a hault just a few months after beginning
due to pressure from the citizens of Orting and a
couple of unfortunate driving incidents with the
dump trucks involving the intern Brian O'Bannon.
In 1915, Kurt had gone off to join in the Great War
and Chris had gone to work for the infamous Eli
Gang smuggling beer across the Puyallup/Sumner
border. Here he met up with Mark Mahaffie. Mark
had shown Chris his designs for a large beer gun
capable of firing a constant stream of beer from
the heart of downtown Sumner to 9th and Stewart in
Puyallup some 5 miles away. They two of them got
approval to build the Sudsocannon from the boss,
Rocky Eli, and went to work. The first prototype
met with limited sucess. It had plenty of power but
was quite inaccurate. Within 6 months Chris and
Mark had a Sudsocannon that could fire beer at
4000 gallons/minute over 7 miles and be accurate to
within 100 yards.
Kurt returned home from the battlefields of Europe in
1919 ashamed and embarassed by the defeat of the
Germans but was eager to go back to work here in
the U.S. He and Chris once again set out to finish
the demolition of Denny Hill. They went to work
with Don to try to devise a new method of knocking
down the hill. They had several ideas including
nuclear weapons and photon torpedos but most were
not feesable due to the fact that the technology
had yet to be invented. It was Brian the intern
that suggested using Mark's Sudsocannon after he
was playing with it and blew himself clear to
Ballard. The idea was overlooked for obvious
reasons but was finnaly approved when Don
suggested using water instead of beer. The
Sudsocannon was renamed the Hydrocannon and the
design was pattented. The Denny Hill Demolition
Co. finaly leveled the last of the hill in late
1934.
In a recent article in forbes about the two self made
billionaires the question of how two guys in their
late twenties could have formed a company over 100
years ago was answered. "They are very
clever."
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