Quote:
Originally Posted by dennis in se pa
Like they are Democrats and Republicans. Too close to top of the slab the argument is made that it did not have enough above it to hold he slab up. Too close to the bottom and it would fall out the bottom. I was not a structural engineer, I was a computer networked systems engineer, certified by Novell, Microsoft, and A Plus. So I will defer to someone more competent in this area, but it seems to me if the foundation had not failed there would not have been a failure.
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What we were discussing there has no bearing on what took place that caused the failure that led to the building falling. It was just an interesting observation from some of the photos that were published.
I would guess that the slabs in between the columns will probably be somewhere around 9 inches thick. They likely had both upper and lower mats of reinforcement steel. Ordinarily, you look for about 3 inches of cover as a minimum, for any rebar. Let’s leave aside the notion that the way that most slabs are designed pretty well guarantees that there will be some deflection/creep over time.
One thing that interested me was the possibility that the rebar may have been placed incorrectly, which might be symptomatic of poor construction quality.
The other thing was whether or not they ran rebar the other direction. I’ve seen instances where engineers left it out of the drawings, or contractors failed to put it in. It’s also possible that it was laid above the bars that pulled out, and is still there. Hard to tell without better photos.