Newly constructed building in china falls neatly over

Stuff like this makes me more appreciative of America's strict building and manufacturing standards. I'd be worried if I lived one of those other two identical buildings.






Nine held over Shanghai building collapse
The Chinese authorities are holding nine people in connection with the collapse of a 13-storey block of flats, raising fresh questions about corruption and shoddy practices in China's construction industry.

By Peter Foster in Beijing
Published: 5:11PM BST 29 Jun 2009

The collapse at the Lotus Riverside, a complex of 11 residential buildings in Shanghai, early on Saturday morning killed one construction worker and left hundreds of prospective tenants angrily demanding their money back.

China's official news agency, Xinhua, said officials were taking "appropriate control measures" against nine people, including the developer, construction contractor and supervisor of the project after it was reported that the company's construction license had expired in 2004.

The collapse shocked many in China where construction failures are relatively common in inland areas, but not expected in showcase cities such as Shanghai which will host the 2010 World Expo



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5685963/Nine-held-over-Shanghai-building-collapse.html

damn, who knew?

gravity sucks.

it'll be interesting to see how it was actually built.

Many large buildings (e.g.all the buildings in New Orleans and Houston) rest on caissons which are driven into the earth but not onto bedrock. They essentially float on the caissons. The Hibernia Bank building in New Orleans, which was for a long time the tallest building in New Orleans and had an observation platform on the roof, had to have its caissons replaced in the 1970s (probably due to rot). How they did that is a mystery to me.

This effects us directly as the level of corruption in the building trades may very well reflect the level of corruption in other regulatory agencies in China, such as the bodies in charge of producing foodstuffs (poison in baby food for filler) and drugs (it looks like my cancer medicine but it's really just milk sugar in a capsule).

the construction remained intact, but the foundation, well, it just wasn't quite right.

That's hilarious.................

Jeez! And to think that we've complained about the cheap screws we get from China sold at Lowes. They could take a lesson from old time American building & manufacturing ethic/practices.

and bridges in Minnesota

:hi:

I fear that those days are also behind us in this country however.

I hope that nugget is on tape somewhere.

And for the most part (not in all cases) the old schoolers built things to last. This wasn't the fault of the tradesmen and construction workers as much as the old school engineers and architects. They usually "overbuilt" their buildings. Plus, they were working with some of the best materials ever. Huge chunks of stone, bricks that weren't fired with eight holes in them, tradesmen who still had a strong sense of pride in their workmanship (for they knew that they were working on a quality structure).

Take a look at some of the "antique" structures near where you live - the courthouses, statehouses, some of the schools, post offices, banks, and other "important" buildings. You won't see construction of that caliber being done today. Some of my greatest admiration is for the massive stone, arched bridges that are well over 100 years old and still in use today.

Perhaps you've seen some of the building implosions on YouTube. Of the implosions which fail, almost all are old school structures. The new shit comes down like a stack of clay pots. That old stuff tends to shrug off the explosive charges and give the demolition team the great big finger. And don't get me wrong - the vast and overwhelming majority of building implosions are successful nomatter what the age of it. But the failures - it's that old school stuff coming back to haunt somebody.

Celtic Merlin
Carlinist

anticipate every contingency, so things were overbuilt, just in case. Starting with Galloping Gertie and proceeding with the early access to computers, a lot of structures were designed to calculation because engineers and architects had the means to do the calculations. It also didn't help that drafters could draw things that couldn't be built. After a couple spectacular failures, a little caution returned.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mclp9QmCGs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse

hold a candle to houses that were built at the beginning of the last century. Why? People expected to live in them forever and pass them down to future generations of the family. They made sure that things were built with quality and held people accountable.

Today everything is built to be disposable. Very few people stay in the same place for generations. Why bother with quality when you have no long term interest in a building? A lot of very short term thinking going on everywhere.

that were well built. The ones that weren't well built didn't last.

The real shame is that the buildings that have survived are concentrated in old population centers in the Midwest and Northeast. It's one thing to build something with a ten year life span, it's quite another to abandon entire neighborhoods that have stood the test of time.

The best example of that I've seen is St. Louis, but I'd be willing to bet that Detroit stands as a monument to your statement.

I grew up the Gulf Coast. The 1969 hurricane (Camille) blew away a lot of buildings, but some of the really neat old ones, the old grade school which looked out over the harbor, stood their ground and were gutted but structurally sound. But nobody liked them and it was deemed too expensive to retrofit them with AC so they tore them down and put up tract-style buildings with AC and sheet rock. One of the high schools was a fantastic three-story wooden structure that had weathered numerous hurricanes. They tore it down and put up something with brick veneer and no windows. In the school bus one day we were passing a string of fantastic old mansions on the beach and the kid in the seat next to me said proudly, "Those are old houses, I live in a new house." Americans, generally, don't appreciate value over newness, reflected by the fact that there are more than twenty brands of toothpaste and shampoo to choose from in a store, when they are almost all, more or less, exactly the same. If London was in America, the only building left standing more than 30-years-old would be the palace.

The older buildings had high ceilings and large windows to let the breeze blow through. The new buildings are just like every tract style home you see - they are cheaper to cool and heat but generally soulless. If electricity ever gets really expensive they'll be screwed - you can't turn the AC off in those buildings because it'd be like the black hole of Calcutta. Fortunately, there are lots of really great old public buildings left in the South (and, I'm sure, the rest of the country). If you go into old city halls and courthouses in lots of towns you'll find they've been retrofitted with this really hideous acoustic tile drop ceiling. But those drop ceilings can be torn out, restoring the building and it's originally designed temperature regulation features (like transoms over the doorways). You may find communities reclaiming their old public buildings and tearing down the crap.

Before you leap to the conclusion that they should just adjust to the temperature and save the old building, bear in mind that it's often over 90 degrees with 100 percent humidity for months on end in the South (which may help explain why the population of the South declined or remained static for much of the 20th Century and then surged in the 1960s, after AC became practicable for homes). I asked my father, who had worked as an attorney in New Orleans in the 1930s, how they managed to do office work in those conditions and he said, "We used fans and opened the windows. But in truth, we didn't really get much done in the summer. It was just too hot to work much." Businesses started putting AC in buildings in the 1950s more to improve efficiency than anything else. I lived most of my life in the South without AC, but truth be told, in the summer when I was at home I spent a lot of time sitting in a chair in front of a fan. Try working in a darkroom with sweat dripping off of your face onto your paper, or cooking something and while you're preparing it the sweat is dripping off your face into the batter (ewwwwwwww). Really nice old homes would sometimes have the kitchen in a separate outbuilding, which removed the heat of the kitchen from the rest of the house while lessening the chance that the main house would burn down if the kitchen caught fire.

Air conditioning had a major impact.

Senators Stennis and Eastland had a lot of seniority and were able to get the testing facility built in Mississippi. Touted it as a great boon for Mississippians, gonna bring in a lot of jobs.

Unfortunately, no one in Mississippi was qualified to do any of the jobs at NASA, so after the initial boom of construction jobs, the only jobs native Mississippians had was mowing the grass and cleaning the toilets.

The problem may be that Mississippi schools are run by people that went to school in Mississippi. If you suggested to them that maybe they should hire some consultants from someplace like Minnesota (where a lot of high schools have over 90% of their graduates go on to college) to tell them how to improve things, I'm sure they'd respond, "We don't need no advice from no Yankees."

build it quick, make a bunch of money, people are only gonna live here a little while, then move up, so don't waste time, we gotta get it done yesterday, if it outlasts the one year warranty we're fine. Fuck em, we got ours, who cares about the others.

Yeah, I worked the nail trade for over 35 years and just got damn tired of shooting flakeboard sheathing on the studs that were being covered two days after the walls were built. Anyone else know what happens after the framing really dries out and it's covered with drywall, ahhhhh gaud, chinese drywall, the shit never stops does it?

And the "Fuck 'em, we got ours" attitude is KILLING this country. It's a big part of why Corporate America believes that sending jobs overseas is a good idea (those assholes).

I live in a house that's 85 years old. It's frame (I prefer brick), but it IS built like a tank. The floors are 3/4 inch tongue-and-groove subfloor laid at a 45-degree angle to the joists with a 3/4 inch overlay of hard maple finish floor laid at a right angle to the joists - all of which (both layers) was toe-nailed into place so no nail heads would show. The walls are the old horsehair plaster over wood lath with a hard white skim coat.

My homeowner's insurance specifically states that they won't pay to have the place rebuilt with the same methods and materials should there be a fire, etc. Nobody wants to build anything for the long term anymore, and that's backward-thinking bullshit. Even with the cost of the restoration that was done a few years ago added into the total, the Brooklyn Bridge has paid for itself a hundred times over because it has lasted so very long. How many cheapshit houses have NOT had to be built because my house was built to last a century or longer?

I'm certain that most Americans understand and agree with me on this point, but the people who are calling the shots don't care because "Quick and Dirty" is the order of the day.

Celtic Merlin
Carlinist

For any given "level" of technology, it tends to go through an evolution.
For example, when bridges were built using iron (and later, steel) trusses,
they started out over-engineered and, as time went by, engineers learned
to build them more and more economically. Then came the Tay Bridge
Disaster.

http://www.technologystudent.com/struct1/taybrd1.htm

Engineers had now learned what the ultimate limit was for truss bridge
design and truss bridges, when properly maintained, now mostly stay
standing.

Then came new technology: The suspension bridge. The early samples
(such as the Brooklyn Bridge) were massively over-engineered. And as
time went by, the engineers got smarter and the bridges got lighter and
more economical. The ultimate limit of that was the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge Disaster.

Engineers had now learned what the ultimate limit was for suspension
bridge designs and suspension bridges, when properly maintained,
also now mostly stay up.

If anything, computer aided design may finally break this cycle of
"build more and more economically until one falls down, then back
off a little". We now understand enough about aerodynamics and
materials and a host of other things that a computer simulation
of a structure (such as a bridge) can now quite precisely predict
whether or not the structure will stand. This is especially true as
we add "earthquake resistance" to the set of desirable characteristics.

Tesha


For more information about this idea, see "Engineers of Dreams".

http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Dreams-Builders-Spanning-America/dp/0679760210

but labor costs are at a higher ratio now, and *** DING DING DING *** builders demand much, much higher profit margins than "back in the day".

Actually wanted one older than that, but this house was perfect for what we need now.
I refused to even look at anything built after 1960.
Both additions were over built also, says Mr. D.

Funding for that upkeep is the problem.

It was their age, primarily. Things wear out. Newer technologies come along.

about Chinese forgeries entering the system. Heat treated bolts have special markings, but they can't be told from Chinese bolts that aren't treated but have the same markings! I saw an installation with six stainless steel flanges. Six months later, I happened to see the same installation with 5 stainless steel flanges and one very rusty plated flange!

Much has been done by the fastener industry to prove that the fasteners you have are real. It was a real problem a decade ago.

I wonder if they never even hooked the pipes up to a sewer system and were pumping liquids into the dirt under the building that had no foundation.

MSM tells me that jet fuel (kerosene) has the ability to melt steel into a liquid?

Of course I belive everything they say.. I'm patriotic :patriot:

I have to travel to China a fair amount for business and I have seen (and experienced) it first hand. What makes it so odd is that it's such a common occurrence that when it happens, the people just get out of their car and continue walking to their destination. A state vehicle recovery truck comes by and picks it up - it's destination from there I can't confirm.

In Shanghai a couple years ago I was riding in a "Shanghai Buick", basically a Park Avenue done on the cheap. They use these as their limo's at the hotels. We had a wheel fall off of our vehicle while we were barely moving in traffic. The driver got out, helped me out, and walked me to a nearby hotel where my hotel was sending another car. The driver walked back.


Just odd and very, very bizarre.

:scared:

(On edit: yeah, that's why there's piles of them around the fallen-over building! :o )

:rofl:

Better now than after an earthquake though.

Well, except for the folks in those other 2 buildings anyway...

Dominoes, anyone?

It's almost like they spaced them to avoid the domino effect.

Ok, that was bad! :spank:

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

:spank:

in one piece even after hitting the ground.
Looks like they simply didn't tie it to the foundation worth sh*t.

It seems the construction of the actual structure was sound, but the foundation.... wasn't.

How much more expensive would it really be to pour a little extra concrete and make an actual foundation? :shrug: Just bizarre.

got his training at the Lego School of Architecture and Engineering in Denmark

I'm not shitting you. Some of the Technics sets are MASSIVE and indestructible. I haven't figured out why that technology hasn't been incorporated into large-scale structures.

it was just the attachment to a foundation that was the problem.

And from my experience, that's usually the EXACT same problem one has with legos!!

No?

We've got some REALLY cool ones. Some have roads, rivers, castle foundations, etc. Did I mention that we like Lego?

adhering to strict building codes does cut into profits. And generally, in this country, when rules cut into profits, those rules usually go away.

i probably shouldn't have said anything. There'll probably be mass building-code repeal now.

I read that whiplash doesn't exist in countries that don't have auto insurance

Self-deleted.

That's not the case when it comes to construction.

Building construction is usually handled by local firms, not huge mega-corporations. (The exception being most federal construction and federally-funded infrastructure.) Local firms don't have the money to pay for tons of security for their chief officers -- CEO, CFO, Board of Directors, etc... If there were wide-scale building collapses here, you wouldn't just see massive lawsuits, you'd see construction company owners getting lynched left, right, and center.

Plenty of shoddy construction in this country, but it'll stay up 999 times out of 1000.

A firm for the earthwork, a firm for the foundation, a firm for the superstructure . . . and none of them wants to be holding the bag if something comes out wrong. So they narc on each other at the drop of a hat. It actually works pretty well.

Hurricane Andrew revealed shoddy construction and inadequate building inspection that led to new statewide requirements to produce more hurricane-worthy homes.

Ten years later, one thing is clear: If you are buying a newly constructed home, it will cost you thousands of dollars more because of Andrew-prompted building code changes.

What isn't clear is whether those changes will make homes any safer. The building industry persuaded the Legislature to delay implementing the new code from July 2001 to March, then pulled thousands of permits under the old codes at the end of February.

http://www.sptimes.com/2002/webspecials02/andrew/day2/story1.shtml

that has already had two major collapses causing at least 2 deaths in the past few months. The latest was that parking garage collapse yesterday. And they have contracts to build a lot more MAJOR buildings and lots. :scared:

:hide:

Fire, Not Explosives, Felled 3rd Tower on 9/11, Report Says
..

These fires might have been fed partly by the diesel from tanks and a pressurized fuel line, which were on the fifth to the ninth floors, Dr. Sunder said. But the analysis showed that even in the worst case, the diesel fuel-fed fire would not have burned hot enough or long enough to have played a major role in weakening the structure. The investigators determined that the fire that day was fed mainly by office paper and furnishings.
...
Dr. Sunder said the investigators considered the possibility that explosives were used, but ruled it out because the noise associated with such an explosion would have been 10 times louder than being in front of the speakers at a rock concert, he said, and detectable from as far as a half a mile away. He said that interviews with eyewitnesses and a review of video taken that day provided no evidence of a sound that loud just before the collapse.
....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/nyregion/22wtccnd.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print

:rofl:

lol

like some buildings we know of.

they were really counting on that

"I wonder what this footings/slab business it shows on these plans refers to?"

Likely thermite. :P

Nanothermite!

I think that means they will get a little more than a slap on the wrist.

as seems to be a common punishment when someone in Chinese business commits a major boo-boo.

Preliminary investigations found that the Shanghai building fell over after workers began excavating an underground garage for the complex, causing the bank of the river next to the complex to collapse.

My husband bought steel scaffolding a few years ago. All he could find was stuff that was made in China. It started to rust almost immediately. From what we can determine, they don't bother with priming anything before they paint it. Same deal on some Adirondack chairs we bought on sale that turned out to be Chinese made. Paint immediately started to flake, no primer. My husband sat down on one a couple of weeks ago and the back fell off. Time to learn woodworking.

I love mine.

http://www.canadianhomeworkshop.com/woodworking-projects/furniture-plans/build-this-adirondack-chair/a/19218

pile of bricks and rubble when it hit the ground. Most of it still looks intact.

How would you like to have a lease in one of the remaining buildings?

in the 19th Century. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers and other technical associations still do most of the research and writing. Back in the 1970's I think the revised electrical code was held up because it went to membership for confirmation and a bunch of hospital administrators (non-engineers) voted against the new code because they figured it would save them money to keep using the old code. After it was explained to them why a new code was needed, the new code was quietly passed.

:shrug:

That just seems SAD!!! :rofl:

A steel frame building is very strong. Even poorly-built Chinese buildings are strong enough to fall down mostly in tact. If the planes that hit the World Trade Center on 9-11 really had caused enough damage to weaken the structural integrity of the building, one big chunk on the top would have fallen off to the side, and a stump of a building would still be standing.

Instead, we saw controlled demolitions, as is quite obvious to any person who has eyes to see.

Sorry. Didn't mean to highjack the thread.

:dem:

-Laelth

:dem:

-Laelth

I think it applies. I am open to a different interpretation, but what I saw on 9-11 looked like a controlled demolition.

:dem:

-Laelth

:tinfoilhat: :banghead:

RIP to that one construction worker that lost his life.

:scared:

Wow.

Pity, the rest of the building was very solid work, seeing as how it all held together. If it had actually been attached to the earth it might have been around for a long, long time.

The foundation? Not so much.

"...and THAT, Frank, is why we wear hardhats."

They can fall over and stay completely intact.

I do see a problem with this design though. The Chinese don't normally use Western style flushing toilets and instead prefer a hole in the floor. This makes relieving oneself problematic as that hole in the floor is now a hole in the wall and it may be several feet up.

And that's quite a few (in urban areas to be clear), do have flush toilets. Most were the "squat" type, but still flush. The western seated type is becoming more popular and common.

See the Three Gorges Dam...

:rofl:

Imagine the energy that was in the top floors of that building when it turfed. How did it not collapse from those massive stresses, which were applied at ninety degrees to the expected direction?

Maybe they did, and the angle of the camera just doesn't show how squooshed it really is.

:wow:


:hide:

;-)

not so much.

That's what happens when you scrimp on your melamine.