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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1349
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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 Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 3:07 pm Post subject: |
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Donald, your posting is off-topic, slanderous, rascist, etc.
Your political views, twisted or not, add nothing to a discussion of why some structures collapsed.
Carry on a decent conversation and we'll be glad to converse. Keep up your violations and I'll remove you from the forum again. |
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tenenbaum
Joined: 26 Aug 2004
Posts: 175
Location: New York
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| Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 12:22 am Post subject: |
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A clever WASP civil engineer brought two Chinese partners (arch. and structural) expanding his office to a minority architectural-engineering firm in NYC area. Subsequently - fulfilling requirements of affirmative action - the office got large NY State projects trough FDC (Facilities Development Corp. – NYS agency dissolved, because of corruption). Only a few employees were able to measure up to necessary requirements in the architectural dept. All of them were very overworked white males. Most of the rest had a kind of good time. After working 160 hours (twice overnight) during one two-week period, I refused to work excessive overtime, i.e. more than 60 hrs, and then 50 hrs a week.
During planning a permanent departure from the office very close to the end of a big project, while doing entirely new assignment to add a final touch to elevators, and checking existing conditions (obviously doubting reliability of work of others in this office) I discovered that the actual basement level is 2 feet lower than in this $40 M project rendering all stairs 2 feet too short. But stairs, when extending down, require also more horizontal space to continue forward, but there was no room to extend them forward. So, the arch. partner decided to increase the height of stair tread above allowed by the building code causing – of course – a messy and huge change order (main tool of corruption) greatly benefiting a future contractor on expense of NYS. If he had ask me to stay in the firm for a week longer, I would have fixed the drawings before the final submission, but he had chosen not to fix them, only to violate the building code. The project was full of other mistakes and quite badly designed.
Similarly, affirmative action might have played a role in designing WTC, and might have contributed to its collapse, but it does not mean that all beneficiary of affirmative action have lacked professional qualifications.
Once after 11:00 p.m. in this office, when I was so tired that not able to do anything, but skimming through project pages, suddenly, there was a movement on structural pages of typical floors, where beam location should have been identical not resulting in a movement while skimming. On two floors some beams were designed twice as week as typical despite a typical load. It could not have been an accident, because the easiest design was to not do any changes to the typical design, but someone took the effort to weaken the design maybe to cause a change order.
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Eugene Tenenbaum |
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