Building Collapse....

[jeff_wisnia]

A more complete set of photos of this June's Shanghai building collapse and diagrams explaining what happened and why.

Jeff

[RicodJour]

Man, those Chinese are something! I've heard of tilt-up construction, but never tilting up the entire building after it's been completed! What will they think of next...

R

[EXT]

Those pilings look awfully flimsy, no wonder they snapped off, there was hardly any re-rods and they were just hollow tubes, not much more than a concrete drain pipe.

[Jon Danniken]

Holy mackerel, I don't feel so bad about my shoddy workmanship now!

Jon

[Robert Green]

Amazing that the structure remained as intact as it did. The foundation was weak, but the building sure wasn't. Lots of the windowpanes weren't even broken. It looked so undamaged that I thought, after seeing just the first photo, that it was a fake. Obviously not.

-- Bobby G.

[mike]

[mike]

Sorry. I meant to agree with Robert, but my computer hiccupped. So, I guess I'll re-iterate (again) that it's amazing the building didn't crumble more.

[Roger Shoaf]

Sorry. I meant to agree with Robert, but my computer hiccupped. So, I guess I'll re-iterate (again) that it's amazing the building didn't crumble more.

I suspect that the reason it gives that appearance is because the buildings collapse was cushioned a bit in the soft mud, allowing the stresses to snap things sequentially as it fell rather than an explosion where the energy is applied all at once.

[mm]

This is actually a better arrangement, because it puts more people on the ground floor, and doesn't rely so much on elevators.

[Charlie]

And to think, it was undoubtedly built using Chinese dry wall.

Charlie

[Robert Green]

If that had happened in the US with all the homeless people we now have, you can be sure that if it wasn't demolished quickly, it would soon be occupied, even in the horizontal state.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

Yeah but . . . (-: Many of the windows didn't even break. That's just bizarre. I wonder what the "rate of descent" was. I guess if it tipped over gradually enough there wasn't a big slam at the end, but still, it's a pretty amazing site. Or sight. Or even cite. Thanks for posting that, Jeff.

I guess I am used to seeing collapsed buildings in the aftermath of earthquakes where the buildings fall because they are shaken apart. The Shanghai building didn't have to endure any pre-collapse shaking and I am betting the ground gave way slowly and the pilings appear to have bent before they broke, asborbing both time and energy and moderating the forces on the building. Still, what a ride that must have been. Sounds like a project for Disney World. Here are some random EQ photos, FWIW:

-- Bobby G.

[ransley]

CSBDS Chinesee Sick Building Drywall Sympton, corrosive Drywall fumes corroded the rebar. Was it even attatched to the foundation? The break looks to clean.

[Tony]

I'm glad I don't live there, I'd never remember which apartment is mine, they all look alike, even the ones that are different look very similar. Well if the flat one was my building I suppose I could pick it out of the rest.

What is with the hollow pilings? They really look weak with a little bit of steel wire mesh in them. Hollow? Would it have happened if it were steel I beams encased in concrete?

[dpb]

I'd guess they were a contractor cutting corners if I had to guess...if those hollow ones were really actual pilings and not drain conduits or somesuch. There also appear solid pourings as well. W/O design documents are to say what might have been intended.

Certainly the lack of any steel of consequence meant there was absolutely no tensile strength in the design to speak of.

Looks to me like what happened was that the lateral force from the loading and wet soil conditions caused the whole thing to tilt and at the critical point the tension load was too much and they fractured.

As to the question regarding steel, undoubtedly would not have broken cleanly; what would have been total result would have depended on depth of pilings (moment arm to resist rotation) and actual soil conditions and, of course, whether any steel was of sufficient size/strength to withstand the moment arm itself of the load caused by the initial tilt.

One would wonder about the long-term stability of the rest against extraordinary high wind, particularly if the supposition there might be inferior work as compared to design in play were to be true...

It really is hard to fathom there would be no steel reinforcement in the design...

--

[hallerb]

chinese find awesome cost cutting methods.

did you know 45,000 died last year in mining accidents?

The US should allow ALL imports, but require them to meet US health, safety and workers rules........

[Robert Green]

Then there were be no point in having exported several million manufacturing jobs out of the country (he says with deep sarcasm). Anyone who thinks those jobs are coming back is smoking jimson weed or worse. The Chinese version of OSHA is: anyone complaining about workplace safety is taken away and shot and their families are sent a bill for the bullets. The scariest part is that they could sink us (and perhaps themselves and maybe the whole world) by just selling all the US bonds they are holding. I read today that the real, "uncooked" jobless rate is over 17%. That's close to 1 out of every 5 workers being out of work.

-- Bobby G.

[hallerb]

On Nov 7, 2:26=EF=BF=BDpm, "Robert Green" wrot= e:

yeah NAFTA was a BAD idea.............

the machines I sell and service for a living now come from china.

my family in phoenix is devastated, nearly all manfacturing jobs went to mexico, home prices are in free fall, severe unemployment.

how long will recovery take 5 years? 10? 20:(

the only way we can compete is moving to robotics with artifical intelligence.

or drop our standard of living to near match 3rd world countries

[Robert Green]

manufacturing

I've heard a number of people tell me that their factory was disassembled, crated and sent over to China. That's going to turn out to be as smart as when we sold Japan scrap steel from the 3rd Av. El only to see it come back in the form of battleships and aircraft carriers that killed our soldiers and sailors. We'll go toe-to-toe with the Chinese someday. "The two biggest kids on the block, they're bound to get in a fight."

By the time we end up in a fight a strong national military, ours will have been so well trained in fighting terrorists in hiding in the hills that we may take quite a beating. Instead, we're doing what we've done for the last

100 years: fought Europe's wars for them. Iran's missiles will land in Spain, England, Germany, Russia and Italy a long, long time before they ever reach the US. Saddam was a bigger threat to his neighbors than he ever was to us. But who spent trillions in treasure to fight him while bleeding out jobs by the millions?

Sorry to hear that. When SocialSec blows up, lots of boomers are going to be in bad, bad shape. No one's talking about how the unemployment rate means there are fewer people than ever paying into the system. Without another technical miracle like the PC (no, it wasn't tax cuts that made the

90's so fruitful) we're in bad, bad shape.

No one even talks about the worst case scenario and that's we never recover. I read that the bozos that did all the fancy hedge fund risk predictions had deliberately excluded the Great Depression from their calculations. Ostrich mathematics.

Maybe. I believe only a national commitment to solar like the one JFK made to reach the moon *might* save us. I read an article that said robotics firms are suffering in Japan and many robots that are leased out are "out of work." When robots go on the unemployment line, you KNOW you've got a serious depression on your hands.

Equilibrium. I don't see how we could have expected anything else from exporting all our jobs to the 3rd world and then selling them the equity in our homes to pay for all the cheap goods they were able to produce. Their S.O.L. rises, ours falls. Water seeks its own level sort of thing.

I think the bottom line is that Malthus was right at the wrong time. The earth just can't support 8 or 10 billion people. The do-gooders like Bill Gates bringing medicine and lower death rates to people who can barely feed themselves as it is are really just adding to the crisis that will hit us like a hammer 20 years from now when the population of the world explodes. For every powerplant we equip with scrubbers, China builds two new ones without.

-- Bobby G.

[CWLee]

Citation please.