It's been my experience that virtually all buildings are "budget
buildings". The owners do not want to pay any more than the law requires.
To our credit as structural engineers people have come to expect the
prospect of structural failure as impossible and, with our skills, we are
able to provide the impossible. I suspect that if the structural EOR for
the World Trade Centre had designed it for the event that brought is down he
would have been sued for gross misuse of his client's money.
Now I've provided structural engineering services for a few churches
over the years. I've generally added a little extra safety - call it using
a larger Importance Factor, if you wish - in order that the church could be
used as sanctuary in the event of a community disaster. On occasion I've
discussed this with the owners, casually, of course, so as not to alert them
as to my intentions, and I've learned the following: a.) they are not
interested in providing any sanctuary to the community; b.) they do not want
to spend anything more than the law requires them to spend; and c.) they
only want the church for their own purposes as a place to pray. All this in
spite of the fact that they commonly change the intended use of the
facilities; down the road the church hall becomes a day care centre; or the
basement becomes subdivided into classrooms for a religious based school,
etc. etc. It's scary!!
Regards,
H. Daryl Richardson
----- Original Message -----
From: <sscholl2@juno.com>
To: <seaint@seaint.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:17 PM
Subject: RE: ASCE being attacked
I am not well enough informed re the New Orleans levees (even though I
started my engineerng career there) but I continue to believe that the Twin
Towers were budget buildings and nowhere near the quality of say the Empire
State building which has concrete cover on all the columns, and that is why
the Twin Towers collapsed so quickly and why the Empire State Building had
very little damage when it was hit by a bomber years ago. And I realize the
bomber was a much smaller plane.
Stan Scholl, P.E. FASCE
Laguna Beach, CA
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