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Sinking San Francisco building

Maybe it can take the rest of the shithole that SF has become with it.:laughing
 
Climber said:
Why are you trying to force the taxpayers to foot the bill? :wtf
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Because the tax payers elected the people who put the people in charge of approving not only reclaiming the land this building is built on, but also the people who approved how it was built. The city has to share some of the guilt on this one.

"Hey, we want to build this?"

"Okay, but.you have to build it like this."

"Okay, we did that, but it didn't work, now what?"

"Uh, I don't know, but now you're fucked, and it's going to cost you a ton! The residents are fucked, and we don't really care. We approved it, inspected it, signed off on it, and thought it would be good. Apparently, we were wrong."

Did I get that right?

When an earthquake hits, the building falls, and the city didn't work with the builder to find a solution, the lawsuits that are flying now will seem like a fart in the wind compared to what they will be, and because the city approved it, they will share some of the blame. The city has a responsibility to protect it's tax payers. Sometimes, that involves helping to fix the problem as well, and that involves using some tax payer money to do that.

Besides, SF is one of the richest cities in the nation. They are also a mostly libertarian (socialist) city. Isn't that the way that system is supposed to work, "for the better good?" Or is it "not unless it's in my back yard?"
 
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enki said:
Maybe it can take the rest of the shithole that SF has become with it.:laughing
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It may collapse and destroy the Bay Bridge. Cutting off access to the East Bay would make SF a decent place again.

:teeth
 
msethhunter said:
Because the tax payers elected the people who put the people in charge of approving not only reclaiming the land this building is built on, but also the people who approved how it was built. The city has to share some of the guilt on this one.

"Hey, we want to build this?"

"Okay, but.you have to build it like this."

"Okay, we did that, but it didn't work, now what?"

"Uh, I don't know, but now you're fucked, and it's going to cost you a ton! The residents are fucked, and we don't really care. We approved it, inspected it, signed off on it, and thought it would be good. Apparently, we were wrong."

Did I get that right?

When an earthquake hits, the building falls, and the city didn't work with the builder to find a solution, the lawsuits that are flying now will seem like a fart in the wind compared to what they will be, and because the city approved it, they will share some of the blame. The city has a responsibility to protect it's tax payers. Sometimes, that involves helping to fix the problem as well, and that involves using some tax payer money to do that.

Besides, SF is one of the richest cities in the nation. They are also a mostly libertarian (socialist) city. Isn't that the way that system is supposed to work, "for the better good?" Or is it "not unless it's in my back yard?"
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So you think that for something as complex as a heavy sky scraper the city engineers are responsible for evaluating and confirming that the whole structure is going to work and stay up?:wtf
First off, the city engineers aren't the best and brightest, those are the people who actually design these structures and the calculations are extremely complex.
Second off, if the city engineers had to completely evaluate every single structure that goes up for structural integrity, there would have to be many, many more engineers.
That would mean many more taxes, many more public employees. Do you want that?
You seem hell bent on blaming the political leaning for this fuckup. It's not, it's the developers who ultimately made the decisions that led to this situation for profit reasons. Pure old Capitalism, the pursuit of maximum profit led to this situation. Now it's pure New Capitalism that wants to hang onto their profits but socialize their fuckups.
 
Translation: I don't want any rules, but if I fuck up it's because there weren't enough rules.
 
Climber said:
So you think that for something as complex as a heavy sky scraper the city engineers are responsible for evaluating and confirming that the whole structure is going to work and stay up?
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Yes! That's their job. That's the purpose of building code and inspection. That's what the permit fees pay for.

I'm just guessing here, but I would bet the permit costs for that tower were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. I would also guess that for a project that large, the city contracts with third party companies/engineers for permit plan approvals and building inspection.
 
Mr. White said:
Yes! That's their job. That's the purpose of building code and inspection. That's what the permit fees pay for.

I'm just guessing here, but I would bet the permit costs for that tower were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. I would also guess that for a project that large, the city contracts with third party companies/engineers for permit plan approvals and building inspection.
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Total permit fees would have been $667,451 based upon $350 Million cost of building.
Not nearly enough to do the kind of evaluation of a building of that complexity that you seem to think they should have made.
In addition to building evaluation, there are numerous other evaluations that have to be made.
I think that you have some kind of misguided idea of what building inspectors and permits actually are for.
Their job is to assure that minimum guidelines are followed, that they adhere to the building codes and that it fits in with the rest of the city from numerous standpoints. It's not to design the fucking building for them, these projects are way too complex for that.
 
Climber said:
Total permit fees would have been $667,451 based upon $350 Million cost of building.
Not nearly enough to do the kind of evaluation of a building of that complexity that you seem to think they should have made.
In addition to building evaluation, there are numerous other evaluations that have to be made.
I think that you have some kind of misguided idea of what building inspectors and permits actually are for.
Their job is to assure that minimum guidelines are followed, that they adhere to the building codes and that it fits in with the rest of the city from numerous standpoints. It's not to design the fucking building for them, these projects are way too complex for that.
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That's your opinion.

This is mine (stolen from wiki): The main purpose of building codes is to protect public health, safety and general welfare as they relate to the construction and occupancy of buildings and structures.

We can agree to disagree. If there is a design problem with the foundation of that tower (which still hasn't been confirmed), then my opinion is the city is partially to blame.
 
Mr. White said:
This is mine (stolen from wiki): The main purpose of building codes is to protect public health, safety and general welfare as they relate to the construction and occupancy of buildings and structures.
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By that definition, the only people who have the right to sue the city are the occupants or other members of the PUBLIC who may have damages as a result of the poor engineering/construction.

Your definition doesn't say, "the main purpose of building codes is to guide engineers to do their fucking jobs."

The developers/owners/engineers/architects have no right to blame this on anyone but themselves.
 
CoorsLight said:
The developers/owners/engineers/architects have no right to blame this on anyone but themselves.
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Not to worry, the right to blame someone else falls on the lawyers. And they can/will/are.
 
Mr. White said:
Yes! That's their job. That's the purpose of building code and inspection. That's what the permit fees pay for.

I'm just guessing here, but I would bet the permit costs for that tower were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. I would also guess that for a project that large, the city contracts with third party companies/engineers for permit plan approvals and building inspection.
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What you are missing here is that the engineering fees for that building exceeded the inspection/permit fees considerably. I have no doubt the engineering fees were in the millions or tens of millions.

The building code establishes minimum standards for safety. That's all it does. If you decide to build something that meets those standards and it falls apart, that's on you, not the city. (Unless you want to spend tens of millions to have the city hire other engineers to check YOUR engineer's figures.) It's impossible for any building dept to warranty engineering. That's WHY the plans must be done by licensed and bonded engineers. It's THEIR job.

I did construction in SF for many decades. They have a very good bldg. department. If it were big enough to reach the standards that you put forth, it would triple in size, and the fees would be beyond onerous. When I first went to SF I could get a permit for a small job for $30. At the end the same job would be 8 or 9 times that. For a small job that cost the owner $100-$200. The big jobs cost much more. If you want the city to warranty the engineering work that SOMEONE ELSE did, then they don't complain about paying for insurance and added permit costs. Huge costs.

(What you are proposing is the worst kind of conservatism. Shrink government until it's gone and blame them when anything goes wrong, and demand payment. That's welfare for the wealthy.)
 
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mlm said:
I used to work next door and could see the giant 3 story deep hole the city excavated right next to it for the new Trans bay Terminal. One off the developer's claims is that the TBT project significantly changed the water table saturation (to keep their hole dry) and this led to some of the excess settlement.
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For the Transbay Terminal, a 3ft wide soil/cement cutoff wall was installed around the perimeter of the site prior to the excavation (which is the norm for all this type of construction)...this essentially "cuts off" water travel through the wall as you dewater the excavation. The cutoff wall extended 100ft below grade.

Even prior the the cutoff wall being installed, instrumentation is installed on neighboring buildings, piezometers are installed all around the area to monitor groundwater levels in the event the groundwater table is being lowered. Alarms will go off if the GW table is even lowered 3-5ft.

The developer is just looking for someone to blame, when in actuality their own foundation design is inadequate. I'm sure the developer, the architect, and the structural engineer are locked in "the Blame Game" now.
 
DTM74 said:
The developer is just looking for someone to blame, when in actuality their own foundation design is inadequate. I'm sure the developer, the architect, and the structural engineer are locked in "the Blame Game" now.
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:party :laughing This opinion, possibly true (or possibly untrue?!? Who knows!), strikes hard!!! :thumbup

CoorsLight said:
Translation: I don't want any rules, but if I fuck up it's because there weren't enough rules.
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Sure seems like it! :thumbup
 
This one is on the design engineers and who ever stamped the drawings, not the AHJ.

Codes are a minimum standard.

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My fear is that cunning lawyers with a carefully selected jury could fool them into believing that codes and building inspector's play roles that they were never intended to play and stick the taxpayers with the bill for fixing this fuckup, and that bill could end up exceeding $1 Billion. That's not the amount that the developers or an insurance company would spend to fix it, but when it's somebody elses money it's easy to do the 'ideal' solution.
 
Just to add something interesting but not really having much to do with this building. Downtown SF in fill zones and near them is quite liquid. I've worked in more than one building there where the basement was 2/3 full of water. Showplace Square, for those of you who know it, over on Kansas St., has a crawl space about 4-6 feet tall. On high tide days, it's not unusual to have a foot or two of water in it. I hated doing electrical work there. I was dependent on the mechanics who went before me to install all their work properly and ground it properly. It made me nervous as fuck to walk around in two feet of water with forty steel conduits all around me.
 
Allowing people to build high rise apartment buildings in SF on reclaimed land is no different than allowing people to build homes in New Orleans below are level, next to the sea, in a hurricane prone region, surrounded by a single levee. I just have no sympathy.
 
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