Building Collapse....

[HeyBub]

For the same amount of material, a tube is stronger than a solid cylinder.

Compare a soda straw with a #2 pencil.

No, wait...

[Kurt Ullman]

I have always called that the Greenspan/Gates Expansion. Gspan for the ridiculously low interest rates for a ridiculously long length of time, and Gates as a proxy for the productivity gains made possible by computerization.

[RicodJour]

Dig, dig, dig. The hollow piling is stronger for its intended load. The hollow tube piling has greater bearing capacity. The woulda/ coulda/shoulda Monday morning quarterbacking stuff is stupid. The excavation and the heavy rains are what caused the building to fall. Note the other buildings did not fall.

I know nothing of the seismic activity in the area, climate (read typhoon, etc), so it is pointless to speculate whether the design was adequate or not. If a contractor undermines a foundation, whatever the design, it will fail.

R

[Ashton Crusher]

It's a little hard to see in the photos but to me it looks like the pilings were actually made by first driving metal piles into the ground and then filling the inside of them and encasing the outside of them in concrete. most likely they drilled a hole to some depth, then dropped the piles in and drove them deeper, then backfilled it all with concrete with some rebar.

[dpb]

Actually, it was over twice that and that was a reduction...

[dpb]

RicodJour wrote: ...

Certainly, that last was precisely the point I was made. The failure was of the nature it was because once the initial lean became of a certain magnitude the construction had little compensation for tension.

I still say seems at least moderately unusual to have so little steel in large concrete construction. I've not tried a typical design wind loading calculation estimate, but there would be quite a moment on those towers that would be translated downward on the windward side.

__

[dpb]

I didn't see any rebar of any size at all anywhere in any of the pictures...

--

[hallerb]

e,

e happened if it

hey its a chinese design, rebar costs money:(

[CWLee]

(Rest deleted)

I was the pers CORRECTION: 3,215 coal mining deaths in

2008

On January 28, China.org.cn carried a Xinhua story that mistakenly reported

91,172 deaths due to accidents in China's coal mines during 2008. The correct figure for 2008 coal mining deaths is 3,215, according to the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS).

SAWS told China.org.cn today that a total of 3,215 people were killed in coal mining accidents in China during

2008, down from 3,786 in 2007.

A SAWS spokesperson said the 91,172 figure referred to the total number of deaths resulting from 413,752 accidents of all types throughout China during

2008. The figures include all workplace accidents as well as road traffic accidents. The corresponding figures for 2007 were 101,480 and 506,376. It is believed a mistake at a press conference led to the total accident figures being applied to coal mining alone.

The Chinese authorities acknowledge there is a major problem of health and safety in the country's coal mines, but say most accidents occur in small, privately-owned, and often illegal, mines rather than larger, state-owned producers. They also maintain that safety standards are gradually improving.

(China.org.cn February 9, 2009)

I can provide the links I read from the search I described above, but I suggest any other skeptics do a similar search of their own. I now believe the annual deaths in China from coal mining are in the 5,000-10,000 range, not approximately 100,000.

Best regards to all

[Ashton Crusher]

There is some. Go to the very bottom picture, it's the best one for seeing the rebar and the steel pile. Upper left corner of the photo.

[Red Green]

"EXT" wrote in news:4af4a115$0$65858 $ [e-mail]:

Think it has Chinese Drywall?

[DerbyDad03]

.

re: "I guess if it tipped over gradually enough there wasn't a big slam at the end..."

Imagine being in the building at the time and feeling it slowly lean over. If it went over slow enough, you could just walk across the floor and step onto the wall, remaining upright the entire time.

As long as you could avoid the objects sliding across the floor with you, and the pictures and stuff falling from the opposite wall, it looks like you could have walked away from this type of collapse relatively unharmed.

Of course, getting to the door that was now on the ceiling could be tricky!

[hallerb]

ote:

...

ed. =EF=BF=BDSo,

=BF=BDThat's just

or posting that,

=BF=BDSounds like a

Imagine walking thru that building TODAY.

it could be a tourist attraction:)

[Tony]

Evidently that one piece of rebar wasn't enough. ;-)

[news.eternal-september.org]

lol, with a little bracing, that coule be turned into another building just as it sets! Imagine the room dimensions!

[Robert Green]

re: "I guess if it tipped over gradually enough there wasn't a big slam at the end..."

I thought about what a ride that must have been. It's a natural for Disney. (-:

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

I remember driving across the Verazzano Narrows Bridge in NYC during a very windy blizzard. I think that's the most scared I've every been. The bridge deck was icing over, tractor-trailers were rocking from side to side from the high wind and the bridge deck was shaking very hard.

Everbody in their cars had the hunkered down look you see on pictures of Civil War soldiers charging into a storm of bullets. Not one smile, hands clenched to the wheel, passengers all ashen-faced with fear. All I could think about was that famous film of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge breaking up in high winds. I was driving an Oldsmobile F-85 with rear wheel drive (I don't think very many cars had FrontWD back then) and it was fishtailing all over the road. The only way to drive was to make sure you had slow, but steady forward motion. If you stopped, you were going to spin on start up.

This was back when the VN bridge first opened, about 1964 or so, and there had not been a storm that bad so I figured I was a goner. What I worried about was whether I had clean underwear on and whether God would mind that I suddenly couldn't remember the words to the Lord's Prayer. Yes, the mind works in really weird ways. So I kind sort of imagine what a ride like that feels like. Sort of. (-: I'll bet, by some standards, the building would be less scary because it was over in seconds. My bridge ordeal took about an hour to cross a bridge that normally took 4 minutes.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

mine,

If that was a NYC building, the foundation would be packed with dead mobsters instead of rebar. (-"

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

Architect I.M. Pei once said that we should reconsider our love of skyscrapers, particularly in earthquake zones because "Someday, the world's tallest building may end up being the world's longest one." I think he may be right if this is how they're being built.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

Excellent catch, sir. I never failed to be amazed at how erroneous (and nearly unbelievable) information gains a monstrous life of its own on the Internet. Who hasn't done a Google search on a phrase in, say Wikipedia, only to find that 100 other sites have lifted the information? Sometimes it's verbatim, but sometimes is been subject to editing that subverts the original meaning, often with a nefarious agenda. My "favorite" (sarcasm alert) false numbers are war casualty statistics, loosely based on the "we lost no one, they lost everyone" theory.

I wonder, in this case, how much of the repetition of the outrageously highly initially quoted death toll is due to good faith transposition errors or a desire to believe that life is valueless, or near so, in China. Actually, what I think it says is that China is much, much larger than the US, so the numbers alarm us disproportionately, and that the Chinese are mining an enormous amount of coal. We had some pretty serious mine death figures in the US until we got serious about mine safety (the Feds, not the industry - they came along screaming ever inch of the way). This Mine Safety and Health Administration site

will show that the US and China have had some very parallel experiences when it comes to lots of miners dying yearly. Hopefully, they'll clean up their act as we did.

BTW, no offense meant to any posters here in this thread - I am sure no one falsified any statistics. It's just well known that if you take any group, from football teams to political parties to nations, there's SOMEONE that's got a bone to pick with them. Falsifying statistics is a time-honored way of doing that!)

-- Bobby G.