From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 10:07:09 CDT
On 17/05/2005 14:56, Doug Ewell wrote:
> ...
>
>It's usually considered better engineering practice to assume that a
>building, a bridge, or a standard will be in existence for a long time,
>and to build it so as to allow incremental upgrades such as earthquake
>retrofitting, than to assume its imminent obsolescence and underengineer
>it.
>
>
True enough, although one needs to be realistic about such things. There
is no point in designing a car to last 50 years when its design is
likely to be obsolete in 10. And one needs to allow for necessary
incremental upgrades instead of sticking to over-restrictive stability
policies. After all, when that earthquake comes, flexible structures are
likely to survive, but the inflexible ones which rejected retrofitting
are likely to collapse catastrophically.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.11.11 - Release Date: 16/05/2005
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