Tanzania Building Collapse

[dik]

At least 17 people have been killed after a multi-storey building collapsed in the centre of the main Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam on Friday morning, according to a local official.

Commissioner Saidi Meck Sadick said 18 people had survived.

He added that the search for other survivors was continuing.

Earlier reports said some 45 people, including construction workers, residents and children from a Koranic school, were missing.

 

[BadgerPE]

"Three engineers who worked on the building had been taken into custody for questioning, said Dar es Salaam commissioner Said Siddiq."

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

 

[dik]

I understand that many of the engineers that did buildings that collapsed in the Skopje, Yugoslavia quake about 30 years ago were taken out and shot!

Dik

 

[BAretired]

Not a good way to lure people into the engineering profession.


BA

 

[boo1]

But a good way to week out bads??

 

[dhengr]

I would question how many real engineers needed to be shot. But, when you see a large percentage of the questions we get here on E-Tips, in today’s world, there must be one hell of a bunch of people pretending to be engineers, with very little real engineering training or education. The failure of a poorly designed toaster or skateboard kills few people, but should be a very expensive recall situation for the company to cheap to employ good, qualified, technical help. Maybe (it certainly seems) companies are pushing unqualified people to play engineer (calling card, title inflation), in which case the company should be hung out to dry, for being to cheap/tight to hire, and pay, a real engineer with the appropriate experience. Then, third world country code and building methods lag comes into play; the resistance to new methods of design and construction, new codes, etc., long standing cultural tradition of how its done, etc. Our codes have become so complicated that the best of us can’t keep up with them, the code writers can’t explain the rational behind the new section, but they want to keep their jobs; and the mud brick/unreinforced builders have no idea what we are even talking about; but they do seem to have taken up our litiginous approach to blaming anyone within ten miles of the project when something goes wrong.