SantaMonica
Valuable Member
A civil engineer friend of mine showed me this, for any of you that go into tall buildings. The PDF is attached.
Government Experts Find That Tall Buildings Can Fall Instantly From Small Office Fires
Gaithersburg, MD: The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has issued a report that casts doubt on the safety of large buildings when a fire occurs. The report presents serious concerns for anyone working or living in (or near) steel frame buildings, which typically are buildings larger than 13 stories.
A video statement was issued by Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, the Senior Science Advisor of NIST, where he stated that "We have shown for the first time that fire can induce a progressive collapse”. This is indeed a first, because fire has never caused collapse of a steel-frame building since steel-frame buildings began being used over 100 years ago.
Not only does the report cast initial dark clouds over the safety of most larger office buildings and residential towers, it also has been given several years of "testing" to prove that nothing has changed since the report was authored. Meaning, if an error had occurred in the study, it would have been discovered by now, and the report would have been corrected. No such corrections have been made.
Unfortunately, no corrections have been made to the U.S. building codes either. This means that the set of requirements that engineers, architects, general contractors and sub-contractors must follow (in order to build safe buildings) are the same codes that allowed the fire to bring down the building in the first place. Many engineers hoped that code requirements would have been corrected by now, because the next steel-frame building which falls due to fire is likely to initiate legal action ("you should have learned from the first building"). But engineers are actually just following the published, current, U.S. building codes; it's actually the codes which are the problem, not the engineers, say those who are in the profession.
The most alarming part about the building collapse may not be the fire, but the freefall speed that the building came down: The entire 47 stories was flattened in 7 seconds. This means that if you were on one of the floors and you saw the ceiling coming down at you, you had less than 1/5 of a second before you were crushed; that's the amount of time it takes to say "goodbye". There is no chance to get to a window or door, much less go down an elevator or make a phone call.
NIST has made the report available for download for those that would like to learn details:
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf
Further questions can be directed to Jennifer Huergo, NIST Disaster Failure Studies, at 301-975-6343 or [email protected]
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Government Experts Find That Tall Buildings Can Fall Instantly From Small Office Fires
Gaithersburg, MD: The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has issued a report that casts doubt on the safety of large buildings when a fire occurs. The report presents serious concerns for anyone working or living in (or near) steel frame buildings, which typically are buildings larger than 13 stories.
A video statement was issued by Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, the Senior Science Advisor of NIST, where he stated that "We have shown for the first time that fire can induce a progressive collapse”. This is indeed a first, because fire has never caused collapse of a steel-frame building since steel-frame buildings began being used over 100 years ago.
Not only does the report cast initial dark clouds over the safety of most larger office buildings and residential towers, it also has been given several years of "testing" to prove that nothing has changed since the report was authored. Meaning, if an error had occurred in the study, it would have been discovered by now, and the report would have been corrected. No such corrections have been made.
Unfortunately, no corrections have been made to the U.S. building codes either. This means that the set of requirements that engineers, architects, general contractors and sub-contractors must follow (in order to build safe buildings) are the same codes that allowed the fire to bring down the building in the first place. Many engineers hoped that code requirements would have been corrected by now, because the next steel-frame building which falls due to fire is likely to initiate legal action ("you should have learned from the first building"). But engineers are actually just following the published, current, U.S. building codes; it's actually the codes which are the problem, not the engineers, say those who are in the profession.
The most alarming part about the building collapse may not be the fire, but the freefall speed that the building came down: The entire 47 stories was flattened in 7 seconds. This means that if you were on one of the floors and you saw the ceiling coming down at you, you had less than 1/5 of a second before you were crushed; that's the amount of time it takes to say "goodbye". There is no chance to get to a window or door, much less go down an elevator or make a phone call.
NIST has made the report available for download for those that would like to learn details:
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf
Further questions can be directed to Jennifer Huergo, NIST Disaster Failure Studies, at 301-975-6343 or [email protected]
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