Posted on 03/11/2014 6:19:03 PM PDT by GSWarrior
I'm sure they can. Not sure what the SF Codes are but it also depends on the seismic area, The west coast being in Area 3 (the most severe), restricts the heights of wood framed construction.
After the 1989 earthquake, I was able to examine the damage and the repairs done to San Francisco City Hall. I managed a team responsible for removing computer equipment and wiring from the Data Center located in the basement. It had a tall ceiling. City Hall was raised on jacks, and large hydraulic shock absorbers were installed underneath. It was impressive seeing a full-city block-size building lowered onto these giant round shock absorbers. The engineers described how the building could move several feet in any direction during an earthquake, to absorb the shocks. A new floor was installed, raising the basement and giving it a short ceiling height, so the Data Center was moved to a new site. Sidewalks and stairs were adjusted so the building could move around.
And the water tower with the now painted over sign.
btt
My bet is that it’s an insurance job.
I don’t care about where it is. Or how many square feet it has. To call it a high rise, as in the headline, is a joke. The new State Farm complex in Texas is massive( 186 acres), but there isn’t a high rise in the bunch. Same for the Exxon complex (365 acres) being developed in Houston.
I think you’re right about that. All the class warfare by dirtbag OWSers...wouldn’t surprise me one bit that they set this fire.
Remember the days of Embarcadero Fwy and the workingman’s district south of market? The aroma of Hills Brothers coffee roasting downtown?
Not insurance. There is INSATIABLE appetite for housing in SF, especially in the China Basin / SOMA districts. These places would have been rented in nothing flat.
Wood framing on a high rise? Can’t imagine doing that.
It's San Francisco. Liquifaction.
Wood is flexible. Brick collapses in an earthquake.
They traded rigid for flexible. Earthquake for fire.
-PJ
Thanks, there is a one story wood framed medical building being built near me with this system. I did not know what it was called.
From what I see, the tallest building in Texas is The JP Morgan Chase Tower in Houston at 1,002 ft. The San Francisco Transbay Transit Tower (which is currently under construction) will be 1,070 ft when completed. But then Texas may still have structures that are taller but as yet unidentified because they don’t measure the piles of cow manure in Texas, right?
Usually they compensate for earthquake movement in the foundation with shock absorbers and then with shear walls in the construction of the structure.
I just gave never seen a wood framed building more than about five stories high. And certainly not in a big city.
Guess I have to get out more.
“Wood framing on a high rise? Can’t imagine doing that.
It’s San Francisco. Liquifaction.”
Right you are, and the 1989 earthquake dropped a bunch of three to five story stick-built apartment houses in the Marina, most of it built before WWII. The liquefaction of the subsoil coupled with these building having parking (and the associated multiple garage doors at ground level) brought them down. A number of them caught fire when the Natural Gas fuel was set off by water heater pilot lights and the like.
You got a point there.
They should imprison the developers who could care less about infrastructure/water/roads etc, after they build their endless 3000 unit apartment buildings...
You can’t just build a building on top of fill these days. I imagine there are some LONG piles underneath all those buildings. I work in North San Jose and you hear the pile drivers running all over on North First Street and along 237.
Only in the Marina district and a few other areas around the bay where it's fill. The 1906 fires were the result of broken water mains. back then everything was wood.
And it's not just fill that causes it, it's the porousness of the rock. Both sides of the peninsula are on water.
What about the Mexico City earthquake? That wasn't fill, it was just dried lake bed porousness.
-PJ
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