This has nothing to do with the North End, but some folks might appreciate seeing the pictures from this bizzare building disaster on the other side of the world. The brand new 13-story apartment building, known as “Lotus Riverside,” has a total of 629 units, 489 of which have already been sold. The report comes from the Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime Report.
The WSJ site reports that, “According to Shanghai Daily, initial investigations attribute the accident to the excavations for the construction of a garage under the collapsed building. Large quantities of earth were removed and dumped in a landfill next to a nearby creek; the weight of the earth caused the river bank to collapse, which, in turn, allowed water to seep into the ground, creating a muddy foundation for the building that toppled. The South China Morning Post noted that the pilings used in the Lotus Riverside development, made of prestressed, precast concrete piles, are outlawed in Hong Kong because they aren’t strong enough to support the kind of ultra-high buildings that are common in Hong Kong. But in mainland China, they are often used because buildings there are typically much shorter.”
Via Downtown North List