11/7/2023 0 Comments Millennium tower lean![]() Mine certainly has, though not nearly that bad. I was told by a contractor that it's extremely common for houses to have shifted considerably, sometimes by several feet. Most houses in my neighborhood were built in the 1920s and 1930s, +/- a decade. I live in the Outer Richmond district of San Francisco, which was built on sand dunes. He's since moved on up to work for a local council's environment dept. We're not going to stop it happening again." "You bought a new house on a flood-plain. He'd then field questions along the lines of "Why didn't you stop my house being flooded?" and "How are you going to stop it happening again?" with answers that were not well-received. ![]() He'd open up the department's flood-risk maps from the last fifty years and find he was standing in the middle of a big blue section. No buildings more elaborate than temporary shepherd huts. He'd check the history to find that for the last thousand years, the only recorded usage of the land was grazing animals and growing crops that can handle a lot of water. He'd look at the unforgiving rocky hills surrounding it, and at the river running through the middle of it. So he'd turn up at a newly built settlement named "Little Flodington" or some other such. He'd take a backup man with him whose job was to sit in the car outside with the engine running. Part of his job was to speak at town halls and village church halls and the like during and after flooding. Tangentially related, I have a chum who used to work for the UK's Environment Agency.Īs some may have noticed, the UK seems to be suffering flooding more than it used to. We place homes on downward elevations and don't redirect the water around the property (e.g. We build property on floodplains and are then "surprised" when it floods. Water in particular we're TERRIBLE at managing. INstead we just build and hope it happens far enough in the future for it to be someone else's problem. We build fast and we don't consider the land's natural problems. Humans make the same mistakes again and again. Is the site subject to wildfire risk? Can we mitigate that? subject to severe liquefaction)? Just because the property is built to code, doesn't mean the land it is built on is safe. Is the site itself earthquake proof (e.g. Is the site on a traditional floodplain? If so what actions have been taken to redirect the water flow? Does the system have the capacity to move the water away? Is there a hill above the site? THAT needs to be evaluated (sometimes they do, sometimes they don't). I often feel like with a lot of building (big and small) there is insufficient evaluation of site factors. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England." That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. "When I first came here, this was all swamp. I can't conceive of building a 58 story building on sand in an earthquake zone. I still made sure the hard surfaces all drained into the storm drain, so that the hill wouldn't become saturated with water. Fortunately, it turned out to be a leak in the water main! I did have a scare because a spring appeared on the edge of the property, as underground water is indicative of slide risk. (Turns out the till was so hard it could not be dug with hand tools.) Paying them was worth it for the peace of mind. Before building it, I hired 3 separate geologists to evaluate the site.Īfter digging holes, they said the site was sitting on "glacial till", which is clay that was compacted by about a mile of ice, and said there was nothing to worry about. My house is on a steep hill, and Seattle has a reputation for hills sliding away under heavy rain.
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