Monday, 4 May 2015

Are soft storey buildings earthquake safe?

Open ground storey buildings are the prevalent building designs adopted by developers. In metropolitan cities especially, where land space is a major hassle, most of the developers construct underground parking area to accommodate safe parking of its residents. However, it might come as a surprise to you that mostly ground floors in such buildings are relatively flexible and weak.  Rather than keeping your cars safe, in natural calamities such as earthquakes it poses a threat to not just your cars but also your lives. Therefore, it becomes extremely necessary to know the forces behind the vulnerability on the structures during earthquakes.

t’s the unsafe building that kills people and not the earthquake. So, a well-designed structure will not collapse until and unless wrong planning and execution is introduced. These days Reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings are becoming increasingly common in urban India including the cities and towns situated in moderate to severe seismic zones (namely III, IV and V).

More about open ground storey buildings
Open ground storey buildings are also called the RCC-framed structure and building on stilts. Many such type of buildings has open ground storey open which is used for parking. The columns in the ground storey do not have any partition walls between them.

The problem with soft storey building
As per the earthquake preparedness guide by National Disaster Management Division, Ministry of Home Affairs, “The presence of walls in the upper storeys makes them stiffer than the open ground storey. Therefore, during movement they move together as a single block. As the columns in the open storey are not strong enough in resisting sideways shaking from the earthquake, they get severely damaged subsequently further leading to collapse of the upper structure.”

Read entire Article on http://goo.gl/5YpsGG


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MCHI-THANE has always been very clear that fine housing complexes and shopping malls cannot stand in isolation. A great City is the sum total of great buildings, great infrastructure and great people. MCHI has been committed to growth of the real estate sector and is credited with the harmonious growth and rise in quality and standards of construction in Thane City in the past decade.


Its aim as an Association of Developers has been to seek rational rules and regulations which are uniformly applied across the board as this will to a great extent result in speedy construction, cost reduction, fair pricing and a push for better quality standards at par with the developed world, with a high level of transparency.


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