Florida Condo Collapse Exhibits Concrete Concrete

It can be months before we knew what caused the collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Florida, last week, which killed at least 18 people. But it is clear that one culprit was a concrete failure. In 2018 the construction company warned that concrete under the pool of the house and in the driveway showed “severe damage,” and found “several cracks” in the subway. A few months ago, the president of the Housing Corporation wrote that concrete damage is on the rise. ”

Although this type of sudden fall is a rare occurrence, the problem is falls concrete not at all. It is a slow-moving problem that affects the whole world. Billions of tons of concrete such as houses, roads, bridges, and dams may need to be replaced in the coming decades. This will cost billions of dollars — creating a huge amount of climate change that causes greenhouse gases.

Concrete, which is mainly sand and cement bonded, is the most widely used building material in the world. We pour enough every year to build a wall 88 feet long and 88 inches around the equator. This is because the number and size of cities is exploding. The number of city dwellers has more than quadrupled from 1960 to more than 4 billion, and is still rising. We are adding 10 New York cities around the world every year.

There is no way for cities to grow rapidly without concrete. It is a cheap, easy way to build roads, bridges, dams, and strong public housing. Nearly 70 percent of the world’s population live in slums.

But none of these will last forever. Concrete fails and breaks in several ways. Heat, cold, chemicals, salts, and moisture all attack the artificial stone that looks solid, which works to weaken and break the inside. (Hot temperatures and atmospheric pressure are expected to produce bad.)

This is not just a threat to tall buildings, but to our concrete building materials. A 2021 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers found that more than 20,000 concrete bridges in the US have a problem and about half of this type of movement is “difficult” or “non-existent”.

The situation is worsening in many developing lands, where construction standards are low and regulations are not being met. To reduce costs, builders often use unseen sea sand to make concrete. The seeds are inexpensive, but they are coated with a salt that destroys harmful rocks. Concrete sand dunes were erected by several earthquakes in Haiti in 2010. Shoddy’s concrete must also have been the main cause of a factory breakdown in Bangladesh in 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people. According to Economic Affairs, in abundance 30% Chinese cement is so low that it forms a dangerous fragile structure called “tofu houses.” Cheap concrete is one of the reasons why many schools were hit by a Chinese earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, killing thousands of people.

All of this is alarming, considering that most of the world’s concrete has been laid over the past few decades, and many of them are just developing – early China. China alone spent more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in all the 20th century. As a result, economist Vaclav Smil wrote, “The world after 2030 will have a crisis that has never occurred before with the completion of concrete.… The cost of the project will instead be billions of dollars.”

Digging billions of grains of sand and rock to form a complete concrete floor will no doubt result in hundreds of rivers, springs, and floodplains. In many lands illegal sands and rocks have killed millions of fish and birds in the rivers, damaged rock formations, and caused landslides to collapse. The companies brought in a black legal market, full of corruption and cruelty.

As if all were not enough, making all this concrete will damage the environment. Cement companies emit 5 to 10 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, behind power plants and automobiles as a source of global warming.