Clancy Tucker's Blog: CONSTRUCTION

Showing posts with label CONSTRUCTION. Show all posts

19 February 2021 - Construction Failure At Charles De Gaulle Airport

Construction Failure At

Charles De Gaulle Airport

G'day folks,

Many countries have experienced great construction disasters, even Australia. Here is one that occurred in France, and it's a wonder more were not killed.

Not long after the inauguration of the Charles de Gaulle airport, in May 2004, a big portion of the roof of Terminal 2E collapsed, killing 5 people and injuring many more. The terminal building was a 1475 ft (450 m) long elliptical tube constructed of concrete rings. According to the official investigation report, a number of design failures were not caught during construction, which resulted in the collapse, namely a lack of redundant supports, poorly placed reinforcing steel, weak outer steel struts, weak concrete support beams, and low resistance to temperature fluctuations.

The structure was rebuilt with a metal framework and reopened in the spring of 2008.

Clancy's comment: Wow, it's a whopping structure. Happy travels, eh?

I'm ...

24 November 2017 - CONSTRUCTION OF THE EIFFEL TOWER

CONSTRUCTION OF

THE EIFFEL TOWER

G'day folks,

Welcome to some rare photographs of one of the world’s most famous towers.

I had previously come across time-lapse photographs of the Eiffel Tower in its various stages of construction, but none like this; none that went behind the scaffolding, right up close inside the growing skeleton of what was to become one of the world’s most famous monuments in history.

Construction began in 1887, designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) and the tower was finished in time for the 1889 Paris Exhibition. Despite the 18,038 pieces of wrought iron, 2.5 million rivets being used to build the 10,000 ton and 984.25 feet high man-made structure, only 300 workers were employed to build it (some reports even estimate it was only 200 workers).

And from the looks of it– not a single hard hat (although perhaps the odd top hat)!

The tower was built as a symbol of modern science and engineering, but lucky for us history buffs, another technology was also in its infancy phase — photography. The foundations of the tower were captured by various budding photographers of the time, most of their work now archived by the Musée d’Orsay.