Dr B

There are very few facts, so I will make up a story which I think fits the available facts very well. 1 Young Ukrainian woman arrives in Phuket for a 1 year stay. 2 She finds a suitable apartment and pays a Bt 32,000 deposit and Bt 32,000 monthly rent in advance. 3 She stays for a year, keeps the place well and passes all routine inspections, and pays her rent on time. 4 Her year is up and she is planning her move to somewhere other than Thailand. 5 She lets this be known casually to the landlady/agent, e.g. as the reason she is not extending the lease. 6 She asks for her deposit back, but the landlady/agent make it clear that is not going to happen. 7 She feels very annoyed and "swindled", and has no time for legal recourse. 8 She knows she is losing her money, but doesn't want the landlady/agent to pocket it. 9 The deposit was to cover any damage that needed to be repaired when she left, so she does some damage. 10 She feels partially redressed, and the "damage", a mattress, some curtains and pillows, a coat of paint and some cleaning up, will not leave a lot of change out of Bt 32,000. 11 The landlady/agent show themselves up as swindlers by suggesting the damage is Bt 350,000, a multiplication of at least 10. I would say to the landlady/agent som nam na. Try teating people the way you would like to be treated.

0.18 Baht in 33 is 0.5%. Sure that's going to make a huge difference to incoming tourists.

Not really relevant here, but the Florida condo collapse information had something vital missing. It was stated that there should have been beams connecting the tops of the columns and supporting the slabs, and these were not built. However there is no load shown on the pool deck in the video graphics, so no explanation as to why the columns should punch through.

Understood, but he clearlu shows that the visible parts of the upper floors of the core were moving down en masse. This tells me that the failure is occurring from the very bottom. If you compare the whole building collpase with a controlled demolition, you will see amazing similarity. I have given a loner explanation but it was described as a diatribe so I won't repeat it.

What arrant nonsense. How do you think the Burj Khalifa is built?

I watched it through, and it is interesting, but the guy is not the right sort of engineer and misses several key points.

Depends what you mean by "ultimately". No building ever actually fell down becasue of corruption, and many buildings where corruption was involved are still standing. The main Thai levels of corruption are through the Government and bureaucratic channels, where the corruption "commission" is paid oave rand above the actual price for the purchase, out of Government funds i.e. taxpayers money. Buildings fall down for techncial reasons, and noting that some samples fail to meet the requirements of a prescribed standard is not a technical reason, unless it is also shown that the stress on the bar exceeded that test value. Corruption may be the excuse for a technical failure, but it doesn't make buildings collapse.

There is none so blind as he who will not see, nor none so deaf as he who will not hear.

I wonder what they are supposed to be looking for in these inspections? My experience with a Thai company was over 30 years ago, but we were reequired to have a minimum of 7 shareholders. The > 50% of the shares had to be owned by Thais. If we take China Railway Company No 10 (THailand) as an example, as reported the three Thais had 51% of the shares, so met the law. Shareholders do not run companies, and have no say in the running of a company, other than by kicking out the Board of Directors and installing another. They are run by the Boards of Directors, who don't need to be shareholders. Shareholders get a dividend/share of the profits, but that can be arranged to be very small, e.g. by paying the Directors a lot.

If you take the time to remember or read back about the original accident, I do not think you will find anything there that linked the casue of the accident to the bus being a double decker. This is just a Minister who knows nothing about transport thinking he must make some expansive public statement.

My guess is that the 80% addiction has nothing to do with hard drugs such as Yaba, Crustal Meth, etc. It is all about kratom, which is widely available in the rural areas, openly sold at the road side in bottles, and can become seriously addictive.

Maybe he just stayed at school longh enough to be able to work out that 1.8/3 = 0.6, but then I am a rocket scientist.

I think there is one other major factor that you have missed Richard, and that is language. Most of the reports of British bad behaviour, whether in the media or social media, can be derived in the English language and they are what searching in English will find. Media and social media reports in Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, Swedish of Hindi are much less likely to catch the eye of the ThaiTiger and AN searchers are they not?

Yes

Because I got dragged intio it 20 years ago.

They could start with why these Government projects start off with a "budget". How can you have a published budget when you don't even have a design or a tender. The answer is that it is necessary beacsue that is what the "commission" is based on. 20 years ago it was 20%, and will not be any less now. So all the tenderers knew that the winner would have to pay Bt 512 million in cash, mainly to the Minister, before they got to sign the contract. This means that CRC10-ITD had a price of about Bt 1.6 billion to actually build the building, so they would eventually get the Bt 512 million back, at the taxpayers expense. However in this case, they had only been paid soemthing over Bt 900 million for the works to date, and only Bt 400 million net. The Bt 512 million would also have been safely put away before the ACOT first got involved, giving them less chance of finding it. People are shouting about CRC10-ITD being corrupt, and they may well be, but the biggest slice had already been taken.

Wrong this time, because it was "of course".

Two comments. 1 Most of the standards for steel relate to ultimate tensile strength and yield strength (in tension). From the videos there was no sign of a failure in tension. 2 With regard to bonding, the 20,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete which fell would have recahed a velocity of well over 100 km/hr. Not much concrete would bond to steel after such an impact.

When the company was formed, a long time ago, there was an Italian with a name like Signor Berliangieri, and Dr Chaiyut Karansutra. The Italian is long gone, and the company has been listed on the SET for many years. Who knows who owns all the shares now.

Over the five days since the earthquake and collapse, there have been a huge number of comments on AN, the vast majority by people who know little or nothing about construction. Specifically these include suggestions that columns were too slender and not "earthquake proof", and that this was Table Top construction. I assume that Table Top construction is somethign done in the kitchen, which is where the people who made the comments would be better employed. I think the term they were looking for is Table Form, which is used as formwork for the underside of flat floor slabs, and has been now for many decades. Once the ground floor is cast, the table forms are set up to the required height, the reinforcement and prestressing laid out, and the concrete poured, compacted and levelled. Commonly extra cement is used to gain early strength, such as 28 day strength in 7 days. Once the first floor is stiff enough the prestressing is applied, then the second set of table forms can be set up, and the process repeated. The same with a third set, by which time the first set is no longer required and can be moved to build the fourth floor, and so on to the top. The prestressing allows thinner slabs and less beams. This reduces the building weight, hence column sizes and foundations, and also reduces floor to ceiling heights. Leaving out beams could reduce that by 300 mm, which would be a 9 m (about 7%) saving in a 30 storey building, with significant savings in vertical construction cost. The prestressed slabs are supported vertically by the columns, at which they are very efficient. They do not take horizontal loads, whether from wind or earthquake. These are taken by the core, which is where the lifts are housed, and has three solid walls, and one wall with strengthened openings for ingress and egress, so very stiff and strong. The floor slabs easily transmit horizontal forces to the core. That is how virtually all high rise buildings work, including the 70 storey condominium in Bangkok for which I designed the foundations. Then we come to the construction, and there as been inconsistency in the reporting from journalists who do not understand all the details of what they write. From what I have read, the overall Chinese contractor is CREC, and they are extremely large globally. They appear to have a division called CRCC, who in turn have a branch in Thailand. That branch appears to have been in JV with ITD. JVs are separate business entities with their own Boards of Directors and shareholding, so can go bankrupt without either of the main partners becoming bankrupt. I have certainly read that for CRCC Thailand this was their first high rise construction. That should not have mattered too much since ITD have a lot of experience, including their own 42 storey head office bult 30 years ago, and many others. There was a post on AN earlier of a Google or similar translation of a press release from CRCC which made it clear that the core was to be slip formed. This is a major red flag. Slip forming is a very successful but highly technical process, in which the vertical core is poured in one continuous operation, 24/7, with the form moving very slowly, and long enough that fresh concrete is placed at the top while that coming out at the bottom is strong enough to stand and support the weight from above. For the concrete to be monolithic fresh concrete must always be placed on and vibrated into concrete which is still fluid, so this requires very careful management and control, and therefore substantial experience. It is not something learned from textbooks or in a univesity course, but by working alongsid epeole who know what they are doing. I do not know if ITD had expereince of slip forming, and if this was CRCC's first high rise building they may also not have had experience, which is a very major concern. It was also reported, without details, that the project had been hit by numerous delays. Clearly this raises the risk that these "delays" impacted the 24/7 operation of the slip forming, which cannot be stopped. I am not an expert but I would imagine that, if the process is stopped, the upper layer of concrete will not be at full strength. There is therefore probably a procedure whereby the forms have to be removed, all understrength concrete broken out, bonding agent applied, forms refixed and concreting continued with extra care on vibration at the joint. This would be a lengthy and tedious process, and likely to be cut short if persons are not familiar with slip forming. The result would be a horizontal "dry joint" in the core at each stoppage, which would have significantly reduced shear strength. This would not be apparent during construction, with virtually all loads vertical. However once complete and fully clad, and wind loads would result in high shear forces at the base, and an earthquake would lead to the piled foundations moving with the soil while the inertia of the building tries to resist, also resulting in a large shear force at the base. If there were dry joints then this force would all have to be taken by the steel, which would lead to rupture of the core walls. This would then lead to progressive collapse of the building from the bottom up, and the reason why there is no sign of the core in the rubble heap, even though it should be the strongest element of the building. I have seen the video of a few high level columns rupturing, but as the tower goes down most of the upper floors are seen to be all falling together at the same separation, showing that the main failure is from the bottom. So that is where I believe any investigation needs to be concnetrated, particulalry on records of the slip forming, and delays and stoppages, at what levels, and what remedial measures were undertaken?

Good data, but it is a shame that they distort by chopping off the bottom of the y-axis. Makes it look much worse than it is, even though it is bad enough.

Just in case you weren't aware, Professor is a position, whereas Dr is a qualification, so it is quite normal for professors to use both.

Unforunately it is not even immigration, which refers to permanent residence. Most of this is supposed to be Tourism, so there are already two different ministries involved. Best way to be able to extract the occasional "fee" is to keep it murky. Clarity restricts so many opportunities.

Police General Siam Boonsom, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Bureau, is scheduled to visit the site later today to assess the situation and oversee the investigation. I wasn't sure if my memory was deceiving me, so I checked, and it wasn't. In the very next article about foreign prostitutes in Soi Nana, who is leading the investigation? Police General Siam Boonsom! Obviously amn expert in lots of things.

I have just read all 5 pages of posts on this, and one thing is missing from all of them. What I have noted is: 1 The road, apparently a flyover, had a gentle curve to the left, assuming that the quad bike was travelling towards the camera in the main photograph in the OP. 2 The surface appears to be in good condition. 3 The weather appears to be fine. 4 The main damage is to the offside front wheel of the quad bike. 5 Given the things listed above, even with the lack of grip of quad bike tyres, there was no sharp turn so he should have been able to manage that gentle curve without skidding. 6 There is therefore another possibility, and that is that his death was the casue of the accident rather than the result of it, just as happened with my friend Colin Hastings in Jomtien 11 months ago. 7 Assuming that he was coming from the top right in that original photograph, towards the camera, he appears to have travelled in a straight line, croosed the central line markings into the opposite lane, and carried on to hit the barrier. It is therefore certainly possible that a 62 year old had some sort of heart attack, stroke or seizure, failed to take the gentle curve left and went in a straight line hitting the barrier. The amount of blood on and around the body would give an indication, but there was no reporting. Hopefully an autopsy, as with Colin Hastings, will clear it up, but then most of the posters on AN will have to eat their very cruel words. RIP Scotsman.