Building Collapse during Construction: Case Study

Currently, I am working on the site supervision for a construction of 20 stories building in a country in SE asia. Last week I did several researches on the technical papers relavant to the building collapse that might occur during the construction to be one of my top priorities in preventing the unsafe work processes and procedures in my site.

I found one of the paper that describes the building collapse during construction. The collapse is due to the soil and foundation unstability problem that was induced by the transported soil from the excavation work.


To illustrate more details, I below describe this collapse situation. 

The building collapse occured on June 27, 2009. The building is a 13-story building under construction in Shanghai, China. The collapse was due to rotating/overturning and falling on its side. This illustrates in the picture (A) below.

 

Picture (A)

Site Conditions before the collapse of the building - Prior to the collapse of the building, the buildings were supported by hollow concrete piles illustrated in the figure (B) below.

Picture (B)

      During the constrution, an excavation on the south side of the collapsed building was ongoing for an under ground garage. The excavation for the garage was dug to a depth of 15 ft (4.572 m.) 

The excavated soil then was stockpiled on the north side of the collapsed building to a height of 33 ft (10.058m.) above the existing ground elevation as illustrated in figure (C).

Picture (C)

 

 

At this point, I believe that you might be able to guess what the cause of the collapse of the building... Please share your idea by posting your comments and I later give you some of my thought and investigation. :)