Monday, October 12, 2009

FAU Needs Duct Tape! And Fast!

Wow. Amazing sometimes how you can look back at a bad idea. I'm sure whatever engineer designed this walkway at FAU's student apartments wouldn't sleep at night knowing this was hanging over the student's heads:


I'm personally surprised that the bearing key (the block of concrete holding the slab up) was made so small. Over time, the expansion and contraction (i.e. movement) of the walkway probably caused the cracking seen here. It looks like the contractor made it worse by putting just one set of steel shoring posts at the wrong place. The posts needed to help hold up the heavy slab that's causing the cracking, not the small key that's already busted! Hopefully Engineering Express will be called out to fix this mess; I wonder if other engineers would know how to fix this correctly.... and, no, NOT with duct tape!

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