On Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:42:50 -0600, dpb wrote:

Ashton Crusher wrote:
On Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:38:35 -0500, Tony
wrote:

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

http://home.comcast.net/~jwisnia18/bldg_fall/
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?


It's a little hard to see in the photos but to me it looks like the
pilings were actually made by first driving metal piles into the
ground and then filling the inside of them and encasing the outside of
them in concrete. most likely they drilled a hole to some depth, then
dropped the piles in and drove them deeper, then backfilled it all
with concrete with some rebar.

I didn't see any rebar of any size at all anywhere in any of the pictures...

There is some. Go to the very bottom picture, it's the best one for
seeing the rebar and the steel pile. Upper left corner of the photo.