this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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You might want to listen to the first season of The Big One, which was on NPR. One of the things they talk about is how many towers haven’t really faced a big quake since they were built, and the City of LA refuses to say which buildings won’t stand up to even a medium quake. Quake liquifaction is a thing you should read up on; it’s scary because it’s a distinct possibility in some of the most populated cities in the world. Japan has done a great job of building earthquake resistance into their buildings, but again, very few of them have actually faced a massive, local quake, so it’s all based on best guesses. I know my single story isn’t coming down like a tower, and I can personally turn off my natural gas line to reduce fire risk. Towers don’t have individual gas shutoffs AFAIK.
All concrete construction reduces the risk of small fires spreading, but like the Twin Towers proved, once the building is on fire the only way down is the stairs, because external ladders aren’t tall enough. It also doesn’t help when the buildings are clad in flammable materials, like the residential tower in the UK that went up like a candle. I literally don’t stay above a certain floor in hotels when I travel in the US because even the FDNY’s tallest ladder only goes up 137 feet (41.75 meters for the metric lovers). Internationally, I don’t stay above the fourth floor, because most fire departments don’t have ladders to reach much higher than that.
That your building escaped without people inadvertently infecting others is great, but I hope you realize that part of what made Covid so dangerous, especially in the first year, was that it could spread before symptoms presented strongly, and that there was strong asymptomatic transmission. It’s not crazy to think some of those characteristics will be shared with other, much more deadly, viral strains, given that we’ve seen such hopping in bacteria. That’s why antibiotic resistance is so dangerous; germs share with each other. Positive pressure in the hallways being a positive presumes contagious individuals know they’re contagious and will stay inside their flat until they’re no longer contagious. I don’t think I need to tell you how unlikely that is for large segments of the population.
No, but good chance it collapses anyway. I know 100% my building isn't going to fall due to an earthquake ever.
And those towers in parts of Japan and LA have faced severe earthquakes without collapse.
Several entire floors were destroyed and set ablaze simultaneously, blocking off the stairwells and ensuring an incredibly large part of the building was on fire at the start. Not in any way comparable to a standard fire starting in a condo tower.
Sure, and in any sane country that's entirely illegal to do. There are zero buildings with flammable cladding in my city. And having seen apartments on fire in other buildings, and that fire failing to ever spread to another unit, I can indeed confirm that most buildings do not have fire spread between units.
Utterly ridiculous of you, that is a completely irrational phobia. If tall buildings were as dangerous as you think they are we'd have millions of people dying in them annually, but we don't. Even considering some of the shoddier builds in China, apartment fatalities are rarer than people dying in their own houses.
And yet in a positive pressure building it did not spread, even with confirmed cases in some units it never spread to any neighboring units. We would have been very aware if someone had been symptomatically spreading it in the building as we would have had cases spike, but that did not happen. So no, even a very transmissible airborne virus will not spread between units in a well designed tower.