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thornhappy -> RE: City condems house for only using solar (2/1/2010 7:18:20 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MrMister
It gets even better (worse). In the Kansas City Hyatt disaster, the original design for the walkway support did not meet the requirements of the Kansas City building code. It was only about 60% of the required strength. After the field change to the design, which essentially doubled the stress on the 4th story joints, the design was only 30% as strong as required.
So the Kansas City building inspector was there all the time, demanding money and getting paid, demanding that drawings be submitted and getting them. Drawings that they either did not evaluate or were incompetent to do so. These are the cold hard facts.
So where is the justice in punishing the engineers while doing nothing to the people who approved and inspected their designs? Who promulgated and published design rules that they were unwilling or unable to enforce, but who took money for their "services" anyway?
I'm wondering if the inspector in these cases is simply verifying that the design, done by licensed professional engineers, is "built to print" when it comes to structural stuff. An inspector would have to sit over the engineers' shoulders throughout the design process in order to verify code. This seems impossible to me.
Say the designers come to the municipality with a structural design. They present the stats on the project; stresses, materials, design margins, etc. If the engineers' modeling tools or assumptions are screwed up, no one on the inspection side would know about it. Hell, the design team may not know it; there are plenty examples in engineering when that happens. The inspector would only see the end product.
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