CROSS (Confidential reporting on structural safety) has published a range of interesting structural safety stories which highlight the issues that can arise in this field when safety is compromised.
The articles include:
- Tower cranes teeter on weak foundations - Tower cranes on two different sites were put at risk because their foundation base plates were affected by low compaction of the concrete. In one instance ripples were seen in standing water around the base of the mast as a crane slewed.
- Weather brings mobile phone towers down - After a moderate storm, two mobile phone towers on the roofs of nearby buildings came crashing down. They had been erected using drilled epoxy anchors into the roof slabs. However, the pull out of the anchors from the drilled holes led to the debacle.
- Toddler hit by hoarding - A two-year-old child escaped with minor injuries injury after a 2.4 m high hoarding blew over and collapsed on him. There was no recognition that the works were temporary so the main contractor and the hoarding sub-contractor were fined
- Wall tumbles onto house next door - A builder who took no notice of warnings from an engineer has now lived to regret it. The two-storey high, unreinforced retaining wall that he built on a new development eventually came down onto the next door house.
- Engineer fails to make proper checks - Having been engaged to approve the design of a project, which used finite element methods to Eurocode standards, an engineer failed to make the proper checks. This was largely because he didn’t have access to relevant software needed to make his check thorough.
Read more
For more on the CROSS contact Alastair Soane, Director Structural-safety, at alastair.soane@structural-safety.org or visit www.cross-structural-safety.org. The CROSS newsletter is produced jointly with SCOSS (Standing Committee on Structural Safety).