...from the BBC, "The number of people killed in the collapse of a factory building on the outskirts of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, has passed 400, officials say.
A senior army official also said that a list of 149 people still missing had been compiled from relatives"
Does anyone know of any forensic analysis done for these sorts of collapses? There's always a mention of the building "not built to standards" but it doesn't usually get more detailed, and it must be quite shoddy indeed if it collapsed under relatively normal loading conditions.
I think that was a reference to the requirement for the reinforcing steel to be a maximum of .75 of that required for balanced design, thus having a ductile failure mechanism. I agree that some of the comments in the article were a bit odd, poorly-worded, and/or premature.
...not to mention misguided and condescending, come to think of it. I hope those Bangladeshis someday learn of these miraculous computer devices so that they too can make use of magic "black box" design preventing any further structural failure.
...going up, "The rescue Friday of 19-year-old Reshma Begum brought a boost to the workers who had spent more than two weeks pulling decaying bodies from the rubble. By Saturday, they had resumed their grim recovery task, as the death toll surpassed 1,100 in the world's worst garment industry disaster."
This might be the key to failure on this building:
1. [...Poor building design is only one part of the problem, however. The best building design in the world is for naught if a construction firm doesn't follow the plans precisely. ...]:
2. [...> Major problem came from the design and construction faults...(originally designed for 1 basement and 5 floors, and constructed for 9 storeys). And it was not designed for carrying Industrial loads...Alam, Md. Nurul Senior Structural Engineer, ADPC ]
........
the rest of the comments did not exactly sink-in, more like common useless-talk that fills up headlines for almost all collapsed buildings, e.g:
1. [... The exact cause of the collapse has not yet been determined, but Henri Gavin, a civil and environmental engineer at Duke University, speculated that the building's foundation was substandard. ...] -> a bit far-fetched
2. [... "It could be that one edge of the building was on much softer soil than the other, so that part of the building settled down a little bit more," Gavin explained. "That could easily lead to an instability that would precipitate a collapse." ...] -> far fetched, poor analysis.
3. [...Another possibility is that weight on the top factory floors—where the crack was spotted—was unevenly distributed. ...] ->kind of like poor analysis.
4. [..."If this building had very large open spaces the way a lot of factories do, and if the floors had long spans without lots of [reinforcing] columns ... then the building could start to lift one way or the other" if heavy equipment was not spaced evenly throughout the floors, Gavin said. ...] -> this is normally catered for in design, far-fetched.
5. [...When designing a building, engineers are supposed to consider different combinations of how loads are placed in the structure. "The intention is to require the engineer to consider as many cases as possible," Gavin said. ...] -> comment out of line, approved building plans take care of this.
6. [...Such modeling is easy to do—if one has the right computer and software. In developing countries such as Bangladesh, however, calculating different load distributions can be a time-consuming process, and as a result might be skipped. ...] -> way out of line, poor analysis.
7. [...From looking at photos of the collapse, Jansen said he suspects not enough rebar was used in the building's construction. ...] -> a bit okay but lacking in depth
8.
