Epic Chinese Geology

[dependencies]

Shanghai yesterday (27th)
Building began to topple early morning, supposedly due in part to its proximity to the water pictured.
1 worker killed and that was because he'd forgotten his tools and went in to fetch them

dunno how to splash 'fail' in big bold letters








http://multimedia.asiaone.com/Multimedia/News/Story/A1Multimedia20090628-7090.html

[porsche4life]

Makes you wonder about the surrounding identical structures...

[dependencies]

Is it too late to ask for my deposit back please?

[syncroid]

The pilings look incredibly inefficient for such a big/tall building.

[dependencies]

Crucially though,
the building being called 'Jackson Heights' sealed its fate

[stomachmonkey]

Kinda eerie/cool how it's in one piece but warped at the same time.

[GG Allin]

The building held together nicely.

[BRPORSCHE]

slurry wall fail?

[Noah930]

Better now than when filled with people. Except for that lone poor worker. So what are they going to do with the other identical buildings in the background?

[HardDrive]

WOW! Love that photo.

[MRM]

Yep. My wife was there. She says it was bad construction, not design - contractors putting in substandard materials with shoddy work and getting away with it by paying off the local authorities. Coruption is a terrible problem there and the construction industry is hit hard. Some mid-level people will get prosecuted and put to death for the failure while the big fish swim away.

[widebody911]

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by mbrouder

The building held together nicely.

Actually, it's amazing how the whole thing fell in one piece without exterior disintegrating!

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by MRM

Yep. My wife was there. She says it was bad construction, not design - contractors putting in substandard materials with shoddy work and getting away with it by paying off the local authorities. Coruption is a terrible problem there and the construction industry is hit hard. Some mid-level people will get prosecuted and put to death for the failure while the big fish swim away.

Pretty well like most anything in China. I could tell you 1000 stories.

A good friend of mine manufactures TV's in China for the German market. His foreman was paying the quality control guys to ignore the fact that cheaper "non-spec" components were being used, with the foreman and the QC guys splitting the savings.

These TV's then began to self-destruct, very nearly ruining my friends business and reputation in Europe.

[ckissick]

As a geotechncial engineer, my job is to make sure such failures don't happen. I don't know anything about this failure, but it looks like a classic bearing capacity failure. The load of the building was too great for the soil conditions, so the soil failed in shear, allowing the building to tilt and topple.

The piles are supposed to prevent this: perhaps they were too shallow. Also, notice the big landslide to the right of the building. It has about a 7-foot tall headscarp, and the toe of the slide is right under the building. It's most likely the slope failed upon the rapid unloading of the toe of the slope when the building fell, but I wonder. In any case, they did not account adequately for poor soil conditions.

I once worked on a job on the shore of San Francisco Bay. It was a complex of several tall buildings. We drove hundreds of 90-foot long concrete piles, and each vertical pile, when released by the crane, would free-fall through about 50 feet of soft mud before coming to rest. Then the pile driver would drive the pile the rest of the 90 feet until the blow counts were high enough to indicate adequate bearing capacity.

[dependencies]

So do piles simply 'rest' on bed rock and get further rigidity at their heads, by being linked by the buildings floor?


Often wondered.

[ckissick]

Long piles rely on side friction. But if the soil is real soft and the piles are too flexible, they can bend. For example, that job I worked on had piles go through a good 60 feet of very soft mud, then into about 30 feet of stiff clay. A weak pile might bend in the upper 60 feet, as the soft clay offers little lateral resistance. The concrete piles we used had very high bending moments. The Chinese project used hollow steel piles that might have bent like so many straws.

[varmint]

so close to the best game of dominoes ever.

[dependencies]

Think the worker was only killed, retrieving his 'thriller' CD

[Superman]

Originally Posted by MRM

Yep. My wife was there. She says it was bad construction, not design - contractors putting in substandard materials with shoddy work and getting away with it by paying off the local authorities. Coruption is a terrible problem there and the construction industry is hit hard. Some mid-level people will get prosecuted and put to death for the failure while the big fish swim away.

Similar to any construction industry anywhere, including USA. Deregulation allows industry to operate more efficiently.