Taiwan earthquake: crumbled high-rise building was reinforced with tin cans

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Blue tin cans sandwiched in between a layer of concrete at the Wei-Kuan complex which collapsed in the 6.4 magnitude earthquake, in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan on February 8, 2016.

Taiwan's Government has ordered an investigation into the collapse of a high-rise building in an earthquake after it emerged tin cans had been used in its construction.


More than 100 people are believed to still be buried underneath the high-rise building which claimed most of the victims in the city. Officials said the blue cans used in the construction of the collapsed building seemed to have been used as construction filler in beams.

Rescue workers found the cans as they searched for survivors two days after the 6.4-magnitude earthquake that has killed at least 37 people.

More than 100 people are believed to still be buried underneath the high-rise building which claimed most of the victims in the city. Officials said the blue cans used in the construction of the collapsed building seemed to have been used as construction filler in beams.

The government has promised to launch a probe into the construction method, and Tainan mayor Lai Ching-te also promised to investigate the disaster.

However, an engineer speaking to Taiwanese TV news channel CNA explained how using cans in construction was not necessarily illegal: “For such purposes in construction, it was not illegal prior to September 1999, but since then styrofoam and formwork boards have been used instead.”

More than 170 people had been rescued from the 17-story building, the government announced. Of the 37 dead, 35 were inside the high-rise. A 15-year-old survivor told EBC television how the collapsed building looked like an accordion.

"It was all topsy-turvy," he said. "You couldn't even tell where the ceiling was."

Chen Fu-Yuan, the chaiman of a Tainan engineer’s association, speaking to CNN, said he believed the building may have collapsed because its foundations were built on loose earth or the construction materials were not of sufficient quality to support 17 floors.

The investigation into the collapsed building will start once the rescue operation has concluded.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...aunched-into-collapsed-building-a6860396.html
 
Did it collapse at free-fall into its own footprint?
 
Atleast they used tin cans instead of rubbish like Chinese did with a bridge (that collapsed)
 
This is a big problem in most of Asia, excluding Japan and probably Korea. One would assume Taiwan would be similar to Japan and Korea so maybee this building was a one off?? , What say those familiar with Taiwan?

In most of Asia the buildings are of substandard work. Contractors not following specs . Owners not spending enough on adequate materials and not paying laborers enough , or at all. Lack of regulation and oversight.

People think of Dubai as this rich glitzy place but a lot of those snazzy looking buildings are crap, made with substandard materials or the cheapest. Inexpereinced or exploited labor force leads to sketchy build quality. Lack of firebreaks when utilizing Aluminium-panels, leading to quite a few highrise fires.

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This is why government regulations and oversight is a good thing.
 
This is a big problem in most of Asia, excluding Japan and probably Korea. One would assume Taiwan would be similar to Japan and Korea so maybee this building was a one off?? , What say those familiar with Taiwan?

In most of Asia the buildings are of substandard work. Contractors not following specs . Owners not spending enough on adequate materials and not paying laborers enough , or at all. Lack of regulation and oversight.

People think of Dubai as this rich glitzy place but a lot of those snazzy looking buildings are crap, made with substandard materials or the cheapest. Inexpereinced or exploited labor force leads to sketchy build quality. Lack of firebreaks when utilizing Aluminium-panels, leading to quite a few highrise fires.

-

This is why government regulations and oversight is a good thing.

This is a problem found throughout the non Western world. Especially outside UK, Australia, NZ, Canada and the USA. Western Europe is generally better, but its crazy how much of the world is blatantly corrupt. I am always nervous in Earthquake zones due to the poor adherence to the construction laws. On paper I am sure this building was bulletproof before this happened.
 
Atleast they used tin cans instead of rubbish like Chinese did with a bridge (that collapsed)

A couple years ago a bridge in Vietnam collapsed and revealed the reinforcing beams inside the concrete to be bamboo instead of steel.

In corrupted Asia, "governmental oversight" often means only half of the budget goes to procure construction supplies and the other half put in blank envelopes for for juice money.
 
This is a big problem in most of Asia, excluding Japan and probably Korea. One would assume Taiwan would be similar to Japan and Korea so maybee this building was a one off?? , What say those familiar with Taiwan?

In most of Asia the buildings are of substandard work. Contractors not following specs . Owners not spending enough on adequate materials and not paying laborers enough , or at all. Lack of regulation and oversight.

People think of Dubai as this rich glitzy place but a lot of those snazzy looking buildings are crap, made with substandard materials or the cheapest. Inexpereinced or exploited labor force leads to sketchy build quality. Lack of firebreaks when utilizing Aluminium-panels, leading to quite a few highrise fires.

-

This is why government regulations and oversight is a good thing.
Getting the government involved is never the solution. Let people be free and the free market will take care of this
 
Getting the government involved is never the solution. Let people be free and the free market will take care of this
Lmao, just so you know I'm gonna use this down the road some time in the warroom
 
Taiwan issue arrest warrant for currently-missing developer of collapsed building

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On Tuesday, Taiwan issued an arrest warrant for the building’s developer, Lin Ming-hui, along with two others, Reuters reported.

The previous day, Tainan Mayor William Lai said that survivors have reported “legal violations” in the building, according to theBBC. Tainan’s government said the building wasn’t listed as dangerous before the quake, though prosecutors are now investigating the complex’s construction to see if the builder cut corners.

But plenty of people in Tainan say they had misgivings about the Weiguan Jinlong long before it fell. A man whose grandchildren were still buried inside the complex on Sunday told the Associated Press that he had warned his son not to purchase an apartment there.

“It was suspiciously cheap,” said the man, identified only by his surname, Huang. A man standing next to him nodded his head in agreement. He, too, was waiting on news of relatives trapped inside.

Huang’s son escaped the collapse, but his daughter-in-law was in the hospital in serious condition, according to the AP. His 11- and 12-year-old grandsons, who had been sleeping on the ninth floor, have yet to be found.

Yueh Chin-sen, whose mother-in-law’s family of eight was trapped inside the building Monday, said that he knew residents had complained in the past about problems with their home.

“There were cracks in the walls and tiles fell off after several quakes in recent years,” he told Agence France-Presse.

Others brought up how the basements always seemed to leak when it rained, or how the elevators were rarely working, or how the pipes were often blocked.

“We always wanted to move, but we couldn’t afford it,” Chun-jung told Reuters.

On Sunday, Taiwan’s state-run news agency, CNA, reported that several cooking oil cans were found in pillars of the destroyed building. Tai Yun-fa, a structural engineer, told CNA that in the 1990s it was legal to use oil cans as “filler” in pillars that served aesthetic rather than weight-bearing purposes. In some cases, this may actually be safer than filling the pillars with concrete: It prevents the building from being too heavy. But the practice was banned after cans were found in the walls of buildings that collapsed during a 1999 earthquake that killed more than 2,300 people.

Still, though no longer legal — foam is now used instead — the cans wouldn’t have been what made the building hazardous, Tai said.


But the cans may not have been the building’s only problem. Taiwanese media has reported that polystyrene — the plastic used for “packing peanuts” — has been found mixed in with the concrete of supporting beams, Reuters reported.

And Lee Kunhuan, an architect and a former mayor of the area, told the New York Times that although the Weiguan Jinlong complex complied with building codes during construction in the early 1990s, that was only because developers exploited loopholes that have since been closed — much like the tin can law.

Today, he said, the building would not have been allowed to reach higher than four stories, and it would have been better designed to accommodate the stress of an earthquake.

Taiwan, located in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” is used to seismic activity, though temblors aren’t often as destructive as this most recent one.

Neighbors who watched the building go up — in fits and starts over the course of three years as the construction companies involved ran out of money — said they doubted the workmanship.

“When it was being built, I looked at it and thought, only people from out of town would buy it. We local people would never dare to,” Yang Shu-mei, who lived next to the building, told Reuters.

And once the condos went on the market, Reuters reported, a local bank would not issue mortgages to those who bought them. Tainan resident Kuo Yi-chien told the news service the bank did not want to grant loans to people living in what they felt was a shoddily made building.

Kuo’s daughter, who bought an apartment in the complex after securing a loan from a different bank, is now in an intensive care unit with a cracked skull. Her husband is at another hospital ICU with damaged lungs.

Their seven-year-old daughter died in the collapse.

“People from outside of the town, people like them, had no idea what was going on before they moved in,” Kuo explained to Reuters as she waited outside her daughter’s hospital room. Kuo said she hadn’t heard about the problems with the building, or the bank’s qualms with it, until after her family moved in.

“They did not know the building was completed by the second developer after the first one went bust. They only found out after they signed the contract,” she said.

Four days after the quake, the developer, Lin Ming-hui, was nowhere to be found.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...for-developer-of-building-that-fell-in-quake/
 
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This is a widespread Problem.Buildings on the cheap with inexperienced labor is normal throughout most of the world.
 
Controlled demolition
 
Getting the government involved is never the solution. Let people be free and the free market will take care of this

Can never have enough free-market zombies
 
Getting the government involved is never the solution. Let people be free and the free market will take care of this
How does a free market prevent something like this?
 
How does a free market prevent something like this?
Now we know the company uses cheap material and not good in quality. The people will avoid them and they will naturally go under. The government has never made anything better, the free market fix everything and business people should be able to regulate themselves as they are honest and caring people
 
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