totoramona wrote:Just on the clay cliff issue alone, there has been much precedent for concern in the South Okanagan. In the late nineties, three family homes on Eastside Rd, built with the blessing of the city, were condemned and had to be torn down, due to clay cliff slump. The condos at Gabian Courts on Green Ave had a similar clay cliff slump that nearly resulted in condemning place and did nearly bankrupt the strata. In Red Wing Resorts, up top some houses sunk into the clay within a year of being built and they had to use slab jacks to lift them back up into place. There were sinkholes that they filled with truckloads of concrete. At Skaha Benches, one of their condo buildings was actually moving and they were tracking it with a gps to determine the extent and assess the risk. Here in Summerland, at the relatively recently built Tuscan Terrace on the clay cliffs above Peach Orchard beach, some of the decks are pulling away from the rest of the structure. As well, there have been multiple clay slides, some of them massive, along Lakeshore Drive in recent memory.
You are correct in that there are anecdotal instances of structures that have failed in the okanagan due to poor geotechnical conditions not being mitigated properly. To give your examples proper balance should we start listing all the structures that
are functioning exactly as designed under the same conditions?
That list will be in the many thousands, probably tens of thousands.
If you have actually stood on the site and have expertise in geotechnical and structural engineering you will see that within the "red zones" this site is really low risk. It is flat, set back from the cliffs edge and is supported on three sides by banks that slope up and away from the site.
totoramona wrote:So to express concern over the foresight (or lack thereof) of developers and engineers with plans to build five story buildings over clay, silt and a running water aquifer seems completely reasonable to me. They don't call these areas "red zone" for nothing.
Alright, two ideas here.
First let's look at the "red zones". In spite of the alarming sounding name, all this means is that you need a professional geotechnical engineer and structural engineer engaged to ensure the site is; one, able to be built upon and two, that the structure is adequately designed for safe occupancy. I assure you tens of thousands of people occupy these buildings in this valley alone everyday and are completely safe. I am sure that if you don't live in one, your friends and family do and I guarantee you patronize business' in buildings all the time that have have been constructed with these considerations in the design process.
If you look at the similar, and less alarmingly named, HSS (Hillside Steep Slope) designation in the RDOS you will see that it covers much of buildable land in the Okanagan. You should not be alarmed at this, you should be reassured by it. It means that the experts in the field of building sciences are putting public safety ahead of rampant development to do their best to mitigate the risks of construction in what is a high risk zone. By that I mean much of BC. Earthquakes, steep banks, heavy precipitation and fires just to name a few of the risks that construction professionals protect you from everyday.
And that leads to your other thought which is the most frustrating one. This dismissal of science.
From the moment you wake up every morning until the moment you wake up the next morning you put your life in the hands of professionals who are there to make sure you don't kill yourself because of all the things you don't know and don't understand.
Eating, driving, flying, being indoors, being outdoors, walking, sitting, shopping, taking medicine, playing sports, watching TV, etc. Each and everyone of those activities could kill you but for the expertise of scientists who have done the hard work and study to make sure you don't kill yourself just getting through the day. Every single building you have ever been in relied on the same expertise you are now dismissing as being so unreliable that we shouldn't even bother.
Can you imagine where the world would be if everyone thought like you?
We have professionals who watch our professionals in this province. We have the BCBC which is administered and applied by architectural, engineering and regional construction experts (among many others) to ensure that these kinds of decisions aren't left up to armchair designers and developers who all seem to know better.
Your opinion is just that. Your opinion. When we start referring to the expertise of Joe and Katie on the street rather than the trained professionals who have made it their life's work to ensure that every structure in this province is as safe as our current knowledge of building science allows, then we are really going to get in trouble.
Is it a perfect system. No. Do people still get food poisoning, die in car crashes, die in aircraft failures, succumb to faulty medications and die in building collapses. Yep. That stuff still happens.
Should we stop doing anything because we don't have 100% guarantee of success? That would be stupid.
What we need to stop doing is listening to the armchair critics and listen to our professionals. When those professionals let us down make them accountable and improve the systems.
I am in the construction industry and I find it insulting that you are making the argument that because some buildings sometimes fail, our industry experts cannot be trusted.