From the Toronto Globe and Mail

[dik]

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.

 

[JAE]

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.

 

[msquared48]

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

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[dik]

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.

 

[msquared48]

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

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[hokie66]

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.

 

[dik]

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

 

[dik]

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.

 

[SkiisAndBikes]

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

 

[JAE]

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.

 

[dik]

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

 

[SkiisAndBikes]

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.

 

[geoffdale]

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

 

[Hacksaw82]

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.

 

[JAE]

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.

 

[ChadV]

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.

 

[racookpe1978]

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.

 

[dik]

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

 

[Hacksaw82]

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...

 

[ViktorMChop]

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