$3 Million Building Sinking Into Ground, Before Completion


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$3 Million Building Sinking Into Ground, ?We had a catastrophic failure.? That?s how an official describes the unfinished welcome center. $3 million building sinks just weeks before completion:

The future home of the Cajun Coast Visitor?s and Convention Bureau that was built on a swamp, is now sinking. St. Mary Parish invested more than $3 million on the bonded and insured project.

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Can't they test the ground in some way, to see if it will be stable ? :huh:

They often use concrete Pontoons or sink large uprights in to the ground if it is unstable iirc

They obviously didn't do enough this time though

The said I was mad to build a castle in a swamp, but I did it all the same.

It sank in to the swamp.

So I built a second castle.

It burned down and sank in to the swamp

So I built a THIRD castle.

It burned down, fell over and sank in to the swamp

But then I built a fourth castle!

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nah just use a little duct tape and a few pallets and it'll be fine.

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Don't hire cheap Civil Engineers, obviously didn't do enough soil analysis and from it sinking five feet they either built the wrong type of foundation or did some gross miscalculation.

Clearly the soil analysis should have found that the soil was highly soluble and combine that with trees close by you get situations like this. They trees don't look like they are more than 30 metres away so combine that with soluble soil when it reaches the summer months the soil is going to contract and this happens.

I hate how these 'news' networks actually don't get any important details, what's the distance to the trees and what type of foundations does the building have.

I will put it down to all party's involved being cheap and taking a risk with the type of foundations, it's clearly not raft foundations unless they calculated the stresses wrong and it cracked which I doubt, piled foundations should have been used here but I doubt it since this happened unless the piled foundations aren't close enough or to short. I'm going to say a low budget of $3m for a building this large, they gambled and failed.

American construction sucks, can't beat good ole British standards or Eurocode which has replaced it now, it's not as safe but still tolerable and makes it easier for different national companies to work together with the same designing language. I've not had much experience with American code but I've heard it's not good and I've seen a lot of results.

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