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| Europe |
| Paris CDG airport roof collapse kills six |
| 2004-05-23 |
| At least six people have been killed and three hurt after a roof collapsed at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. The reason for the collapse in terminal 2E, a newly-constructed part of France’s biggest international airport, was not immediately clear. However, cracks and falling dust had been observed just before the accident, said an airport spokesman. Flights from New York and Johannesburg had just arrived at the terminal and a flight to Prague was due to depart. The spokesman said it was not yet possible to be certain about the number of victims as there might still be people trapped beneath the wreckage. Reports say sections of the roof fell onto a boarding footway. The passage in turn collapsed onto airport service vehicles parked underneath. A spokesman for the airport said that the affected area had been relatively quiet at the time of the collapse. "Several tonnes of concrete and glass have collapsed," Laurent Vibert, a spokesman for the fire service told LCI television. "Some people heard cracks before the accident and there was concrete dust coming from the ceiling. This was a very prestigious hall and it’s a very hard day for us today," an airport spokesman told reporters outside the terminal. President Jacques Chirac his "deepest sympathy" with the injured and the families and victims. The French Transport Minister, Gilles de Robien, and Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin have visited the scene of the accident. Terminal 2E cost 750m euros to build and was opened in 2003. It is used by Air France and the Sky Team alliance. The opening of the terminal was delayed by a week last year when a security team refused to give the go-ahead. The Paris airport group (ADP) said at the time that a large lamp had fallen from the ceiling just as the team of engineers, architects and firefighters had been inspecting the site. Poor buggers. |
| Posted by:Bulldog |
| #4 BBC is now saying 5 dead, 6th victim not confirmed. The BBC's background story (which also has a reverse-angle photo) says the part that collapsed was a departure lounge. From the pictures, it appears the collapsed section is made up of oval elements that form a tube (looks like about 40' high x 80' wide) without any internal supports. This tube then rests on pillars about 1 storey high. While the account says the "roof" collapsed, it looks to me like the underpinnings broke loose, which dropped the whole thing. The individual oval sections stayed more or less intact, although separating from each other. The span that fell looks to be about 60' long. The oval part is what was innovative, the supporting structure appears to be just plain old post-and-lintel construction. So if support failure casused the collapse, I'd tend to agree with Stephen in suspecting material or construction problems, rather than bad engineering. But it's also true that modern cost and aesthetic pressures force designs closer to the limits of the materials used. There's not as much allowance for safety (big beams are expensive, and they look ugly). So it's possible that somebody screwed up their calculations. That would be really bad news, because, if so, it's likely the whole building is at risk. Couple of things for engineering geeks to think on: The section that collapsed included a jetway, which penetrated the side of the tube. That would reduce the strength of that section, and the weight of the jetway would put a torquing stress on the supporting structure, unless it was balanced in some way. And it appears that there was not a lot of connection between adjacent oval elements (note that the section broke away cleanly), which means that there'd be nothing to take the load if a support failed. |
| Posted by: Old Grouch 2004-05-23 7:45:51 PM |
| #3 "The reason for the collapse...was not immediately clear" Hah!Massive bribes and kickbacks to get contract,then substandard material,shoddy construction and unskilled labor used.Some minor inspector will be found guilty of taking bribes,be scapegoated and France will move on to its normal hate-the-US-and-the-Jews life. Somewhere Churchill,Eden,Roosevelt,Truman and Eisenhower are laughing over possible headline:Head of de Gaulle is defective,collapses |
| Posted by: Stephen 2004-05-23 1:57:04 PM |
| #2 sounds like bad design, or the schedule had higher priority than QA/QC |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-23 12:29:25 PM |
| #1 Call home Chris. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-05-23 12:19:52 PM |