RE: Fw: Seismic Designs

>The analysis of that event found,
>among other things, that a significant number of the unexpected failures
>resulted from poor connection design and poor welding at connections;
That was the finding that stuck out from the connection failures in the Northridge Earthquake. There was a big witch hunt trying to pin it on Lincoln Electric, but the commentary I've seen points right to bad weld design and poor quality. Compared to piping and pressure vessel welding Building structural welding practice isn't very good. The idea of doing impact testing and welder and procedure qualifications strikes fear in the civil/structural people. There's a little fantasy called the 'pre-qualified joint.' More than a few people take the label as some sort of magic bean which allows the work to be done by anyone.

>it is conceivable that some
>misguided soul may increase the G factor in order to overcome the problem.
It wouldn't be the first time someone figured that the solution is simply to throw metal at the problem.

Christopher Wright P.E.    |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com        | this distance"   (last words of Gen.
___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)