[Clilmence]

I didn't know buildings can do that.

[Gideleb]

made in china

[BigMovies]

Look at how well built that is, I mean aside from the foundation.

[costamarianavia]

I wonder which side of the building the worker jumped out of? The side in the direction of the fall or the other side?

[Sheelldaw]

The complex doesn't look finished yet. My guess is that some one's out of a big chunk of change, as the entire complex will have to be torn down.

The building doesn't appear to have a basement, nor is there a concrete slab foundation. It appears to have been sitting on a bunch of 8 to 10 foot long wooden pylons.

[bgsavings]

Quite lucky that more didn't die.

Amazing that the construction firm built that with an expectation that the building would stand. The head of the firm should be charged with murder.

[Avgustslim]

[vigraxtru]

RIP Xiao.

Hopefully the architects who designed this deathtrap will be taken out and... given appropriate punishment.

[Maribellin]

I didn't know buildings that tall could tip over. I thought they didn't have the structural integrity.

[NumDusthouh]

I didn't know buildings that tall could tip over. I thought they didn't have the structural integrity.

Didn't major in engineering did you?

[vaalmerruutel]

Oh, and *points to sig*

[SeLvesTr]

Going back to the first picture, it almost looks like the earth berm on the right slipped and pushed the building over.

[Obgrfbke]

Not to be a dick, but that appears to me to be a ridiculous assertion. In order to cause the building to fall in that way, an enormous torque about the long axis at ground level of the building would have been required.

1) The mass of the part of the berm which would reasonably be construed to have pushed against the building is not particularly high relative to the size of the building

2) The force it would have applied to the building would have been near its base. Force applied near the axis of rotation (again, ground level in this case) provides very little torque.

A couple of elementary calculations reveal that wind pressure even in moderate conditions would provide far higher torque than would a few tens of cubic meters of dirt pushing up against the base.

That's not to say that earth shifting could not have been the cause of the failure; for a building with as high a height/short axis ratio as that one, even relatively minor settling of earth on one side can lead to the building having a catastrophic lean. That soil seems particularly unsuited to tall buildings without a REAL foundation.

At a guess, I'd say that there was probably some issue with the leveling of the building, either due to shoddy measurements during construction or due to uneven settling. This may have been helped along by weather conditions at the time of collapse.

Damn, this boy needs some..........

[Arximedus]

NP. We're all working from the same amount of information (almost none). My suspicion happens to be earth movement. It looks like the berm slipped on the surface but there could have also been some slipping under the building.