May 18 2008
tofu buildings as evidence of quality fade?
Well, I’m not even sure if I can call it quality fade to be honest. Quality fade assumes the quality was good from the start and then went down later. Its more like just the usual cutting of corners. So perhaps its more a lack of QC and due diligence… and it is also a clear sign of why rampant corruption can turn deadly. This tops the Panama cough syrup glycerine any day.
Paul Midler ran an post on Friday, highlighting an article called “Why China’s Buildings Crumbled”. I want to display more of the article than he did because it shows how deadly cutting corners can be:
But while rescue crews fought to reach the victims, awkward questions were being asked about the tragedy. One man, gazing at the corpse of his nine-year-old cousin, said he had disturbing evidence that could explain the collapse of the five-storey Juyuan school building, along with eight other schools in the region.
The man, who gave his surname as Ren, is a 32-year-old steel worker who has worked for a decade in the local construction industry. He said he always knew that the Juyuan school was a disaster in waiting. Local officials, he said, had pocketed money that was budgeted for the school, while a private construction company had saved money by cutting corners on the project.
To boost its profits, the company used iron instead of steel in many parts of the construction of the building, Mr. Ren said. It cut back on the size and number of steel braces in the cement foundation slabs. And it used cheap materials to make the concrete walls, weakening the entire structure.
Many other survivors were convinced that corruption had played a role in determining which buildings collapsed and which were unscathed. One man pointed to a new building whose first floor had collapsed, even as older buildings around it were intact. “They used fewer bricks in the new building, so they could earn more money,” he said.
The shoddily constructed buildings are commonly called “tofu buildings” because of their weak structural condition.
They should be so lucky that this wasn’t a U.S. based tragedy or the construction companies involved would be facing a very nasty civil lawsuit and probably criminal prosecution. I’ve hard on due diligence and QC before, so I won’t beat a dead horse. Just another warning to be careful… you never know when human lives depend on it.
