×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

From the Toronto Globe and Mail

From the Toronto Globe and Mail

From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
A 14-year-old girl has died after the collapse of a washroom wall at a park in Guelph, Ont.

The Grade 9 student was rushed from the site – a building located at Southend Community Park – about 12:45 p.m. shortly after wall broke away.

The girl was taken to hospital but died.

Her name has not been released.

School officials and city workers on-site could offer no indications as to why the wall gave way.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

dik, that is an amazingly similar death that occurred in Nebraska a few years ago - there was a young girl standing next to a concrete block wall for a park shelter - a small shelter with bathrooms, picnic tables, etc.

A wind gust blew up and the wall came down on top of her, killing her.  The parents wanted to do something to see if this was a 1 in a billion occurrance or a sign of other potential problems...it seems that park shelters, out in the middle of, well, parks, don't always have any specific building codes, periodic inspections, etc. and were usually built by volunteer labor and not built structurally correct.

 

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Did this have anything to do with the wierd and wild weather in the midwest in the last two days?

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
The structure would have to (or should have) conform to the Ontario Building Code. This code has a provision for grandfathering, but I don't know anything about the collapse yet.  I'll try to find out.

There was an incident in a small town near Lindsay a few years ago where a masonry wall collapsed and killed a youngster.  The work had been abandoned for years and when queried by the town council, the developer stated that it had been inspected by an engineer.  Nothing ever came of it and I don't know why.
 

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

I'm thinking microburst as with the Dallas Cowboys Practice facility.

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

We have several children killed in Australia each year from unreinforced masonry walls falling on them.  Children play on defective, neglected walls; and homeowners hang basketball backboards on brick veneer gables.  Very tragic, usually a combination of negligence and ignorance.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
Without getting on my applebox, if the outcome is reasonably possible, then there is a degree of negligence involved. These types of death are predictable and avoidable.

Dik

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
Further to the original article also from the Toronto G&M:

The tragic death left her family grieving, her classmates stunned, and school and city officials working to figure out how the wall could collapse.

"She was a golden girl, inside and out, and she brought joy to everybody who met her," her mother said last night. "She didn't deserve this, but sometimes God takes the best of us."

Crews from the City of Guelph, which owns the rest building, and the Guelph police said Tuesday night it was too early to say what caused the collapse.

 

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Excerpt from The Toronto Star: "The building was only four years old,"  

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

dik, isn't Guelph where there is a significant wind tunnel facility?  I think we used a wind tunnel report on a large project I once did.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
I'm not sure.  Guelph has a large Agricultural facility and my wife took her Master Gardeners' courses there.  University of Western Ontario has/had a large facility that is the basis for a lot of the wind loading design for the NBCC. The NBCC also uses a lot of information that has been derived from work done in Switzerland in the late 40's.

Dik

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

There is an engineering company, headquartered in Guelph, that does a significant amount of wind engineering for structures around the world, on some of the tallest, most complex structures you can imagine. There is no connection with the subject of the original post.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Didn't they find out that this was a cantilevered masonry wall?

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Some more info:

It was a cantilever wall, one of those privacy walls at the entry of a public restroom. The rub being that a baby change table was installed on the one side. Which the girl was reporatly sitting on when the wall collapsed. There were no strong winds in Guelph that day. I susspect the wall was not designed for the loading from the change table, and gradually degraded over time.

They have not released any details of the structure, if rebar was built in, or if the wall was designed by a professional engineer.
   

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Huh,

A changing table.  Much like the Nebraska wall collapse with the girl just standing by the wall when a gust of wind came up.

fate.

and a lack of good structural engineering required for a building element put up by well meaning folks.

 

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

SkiisAndBikes beat me to it. Rowan Williams Davies and Irwin (RWDI) is the company in Guelph that does wind tunnel testing. Doing my undergrad in Waterloo (about a half hour from there), I was lucky enough to take a wind effects course taught by Peter Irwin and got to tour their facilities. Very impressive.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Well, a small girl sitting on a changing table attached to a wall is "overloaded" - compared to the weight of the baby and diaper ... But not by much!  

Assume, what? - a 20 lb baby plus diaper bag pplus "service loads" as people lean on the table + with a safety factor of 10 being put on the table = still well under what a concrete wall would be expected to carry with a low weight cantilevered load.       

Even a drinking fountain would get extra "down pressure" on it as people lean over.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
A properly designed wall would not have collapsed, and the girl should be alive today.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

But who knows what was 'designed' for, if at all.  I think the Ontario Building Code requires any building element to be designed for a certain point load in all directions (500N maybe?).  But who knows if that happened.  Who also knows if the change table was included in the original design, it could have been added later by the parks department.  

My concern would be if the wall was unreinforced, and continued to be loaded with kids sitting on the table, over time the wall would crack, and become unstable, until the final tragic collapse.  

Looks like a report has been done, the local paper up there has an article here (http://news.guelphmercury.com/News/article/504258) which describes the city wrapping cantilevered CMU walls with fiberglass and rebuilding some wall with the reinforcement included this time.  The report alluded to in the article will be an interesting read when it is made public...

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Hokie66, can you give me some examples or point me in the direction of some of these masonry acidents involving basketball hoops? cheers

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

No, you'd have to do your own research.  You're not a lawyer, are you?

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

Haha, no, I'm a fourth year civil/structural student, i'm trying to do some research on it, but I'm having trouble trying to locate some decent information on some failures, or any standards (australian or otherwise) which relate to the eccentric dynamic loading on walls, like that caused by basketball hoops. The closest I've came to anything is AS4226 which more or less just says "Don't put a basketball hoop on a brick veneer wall"

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

This site actually frowns on postings by students.  For your research, I think you would have to reference news archives, as newspapers are where these tragic events are reported.  You rarely find anything in technical literature, because the failures are not of engineered structural elements.  It is common sense, but unfortunately common sense seems to be in short supply.

RE: From the Toronto Globe and Mail

(OP)
The last news article on this indicated that the Engineer's report would be made public... I've sent eMail to the reporter asking if this was done.

Dik

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources