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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

An engineer who inspected damage across North Texas after Saturday’s deadly tornadoes says he saw “rampant irresponsibleness” in the way many homes and buildings were constructed.

“We saw a tremendous number of improper attachment of the walls to the foundations, which just made walls fall either in or out,” said Timothy Marshall, a forensic engineer and meteorologist who volunteered as part of a damage survey team created by the Fort Worth office of the National Weather Service.

The construction Marshall flagged as faulty included that of a Glenn Heights elementary school that suffered extensive damage.

“We saw problems at [Donald T.] Shields Elementary school that were horrific in my view as an engineer,” Marshall said. “Walls not attached properly, and they’re just falling down like a house of cards.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/dallas/20151230-engineer-finds-examples-of-horrific-construction-in-tornado-wreckage.ece [dallasnews.com]

We saw the same sorts of conclusions two years ago, after the Moore, Oklahoma tornadoes.

Three major tornadoes have struck Moore in the last 15 years. In May 1999, 2003, and just last year, powerful winds caused catastrophic damage to homes. Recently, I spoke with meteorologist and engineer Tim Marshall who surveyed the damage on all three tornadoes, and he says he found that most homes were not even built to code.

The code is to build your home to withstand wind gusts of 90 mph 33 feet above the ground.

The code requires your home to be bolted to the foundation. According to Marshall, the code prior to 1999 also required nuts and washers on bolts into the foundation.

After May 3, 1999, Marshall found that only 12.5 percent of homes rebuilt were bolted down. He stresses that homeowners need to build above code to withstand higher wind speeds.

This includes making sure your roof is strapped to your walls and making sure you use a bolt, nut, and washer that tightens down the wall bottom plate.

Taking these extra measures has been proven to withstand EF 2 to EF 3 strength tornadoes, or wind gusts up to 165 mph.

http://www.koco.com/weather/moore-tornado-damage-surveys-reveal-homes-not-built-to-code/24658006 [koco.com]

http://esridev.caps.ua.edu/MooreTornado/Images/MooreTornadoFinalReport.pdf [ua.edu] (PDF)

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I spent a number of years in construction. I started out with an old master craftsman immediately after I got out of high school. I've worked with a number of craftsmen and masters since then. When Washington D.C. was pushing the idea of immigrants coming into our country to "do the work Americans don't want to do", all of us old hands knew where things were going. Those immigrants working for cheap wages replaced all of the old hands, who couldn't afford to stay in business with wages being forced down. We've watched the shoddy construction practices, and we've known all along that many of these structures couldn't stand. Today - the engineers are figuring this out?

This is politics at work, people. This is what has been shoved down our throats by the globalists.

I saw no mention of concrete work. There was a day when foundations were dug into the ground. That is, a hole was dug, large enough to fit a house into, and footers were poured. Footer - a foot wide and a foot deep, minimum, with the bottom reaching below the frost line. On top of that, you had the slab on which the house would be built. As the articles mention, bolts held the bottom plate of the wall to the concrete.

In recent years, I've watched crews prepare floor slabs on uneven ground use stakes to nail the forms together above the ground. It was to much trouble to level the topsoil down to the lowest spots, so they built the forms to conform to the high spots, then filled in the low spots with sand. That old biblical bit about "build your house on shifting sands"? It's just crazy. The first heavy rains wash away the sand, and your house is just floating there, supported in a few spots where the topsoil was highest. TOPSOIL, not packed clay, or rock, just topsoil

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