And then there is the other question: How can you know how many “follow the regulations” but in truth have suboptimal iron cores in the pilons?
It might sound odd, but, for example let’s say you are standing on top of a concrete building:
How can you tell if the iron bars that are jutting from the terrace go all the way down and were not just placed there like candles on top of a cake?
Maybe there is some high tech way to check, but who is going to employ it? Noone or infintesimally few.
So, in most cases, you just can’t tell.
There is all sort of corner-cutting that can be done in the cement process and they all eventually cost lives in seismogenic places
Well indeed. I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised but I feel that corruption behind the scenes is one thing while official “construction amnesties” of paying a fee to bypass regulation is properly baked in corruption. But I’m obviously too mollycoddled!
This earthquake prompted my mom to tell her earthquake experience. My mom lived in places and they had earthquakes. Soviet buildings held very well, though she says only once earthquake was strong enough to feel the cold of death (quite literally). She lived close to a nuclear test site. Close is relatively speaking, it’s like hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away. But a day after a test they sometimes had little earthquakes, or sometimes it was just dust everywhere. She wonders how new Chinese buildings hold up.
Poor taste is the main feature for Charlie hebdo.
They’re proud of it and they paid for it in lives: some of them were killed because of that.
And they went poor taste also about that.
Exactly. So afterwards you, as a tennant, you cannot check if you are renting a house or a potential death-trap.
In any case, inspection is different from overseeing the construction. The trick I mentioned earlier would pass inspection every day of the week.
Balcony tier iron in the invisible places and pillar tier iron in the visible places is also another obvious trick in the book of corner-cutting.
You should also account that sometimes it is not the owner of the constructions site that does those tricks, but the sub-contractors for iron and cement work.
For example, let’s say you close the deal for 10000 euros. Your margin of profit is 1000 euros (all numbers fictional) if you do the job properly.
But, if upon construction you can pull some magic and replace or not put some of the iron in places were it is visibly possible (which is most of the joinery, pillars and floors), then your margin of profit skyrockets. And there are ways to skimp from the cement as well, but let’s not get into that.
The owner cannot really go up the scaffolding and check and even if they do, most of the trickery is covered by the wooden planks that serve as molds. You have to be there daily and during the whole construction in order to avoid getting hoodwinkled.
It is very hard to pin the responsibility afterwards. Was it the owner, the mechanic or the contractor or all of them? Noone can tell.
As for building inspections, it is not so much a matter of corruption, as much as a legal lack of inspection.
For example, recently, the law changed in Greece to make all buildings made “on the responsibility of the overseeing mechanic” which means no external inspection.
That is supposedly done to “reduce red tape” … yeah suuuure
