Friday, March 11, 2011

Soft-Story Condo Towers Will Kill Us All!

Article


Studying the effects of the 2009 Megaquake in Chile, Adebar found that many of the buildings that were most affected were newer apartment and office towers reinforced with thinner, six-inch concrete walls for support.
B.C. has nearly identical building codes. The thinner walls have become popular in both Chile and North America because they allow for additional parking in underground parkades -- where buildings need to be their strongest.

Well, I hope Japan doesn't have too many of these, although the picture of building burning in Tokyo looked like one!  This is the only engineer in the world that is on the same wavelength with me on the lessons from Chile (plus the Japanese guys who wrote the report).  These buildings are shooting up like weeds all over the place, because YEAH, you got parking!  Tokyo might give us a new low PGV showing the true fragility.  I suspect somewhere around 20-30 cm/s, well expected for Toronto.

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