Hacker News Reader

Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

This is just goofy. Timber-framed structures do well in earthquakes, and while they catch fire often enough during construction, once fire sprinklers are installed and people live there, serious residential apartment fires in modern construction are really rare. The most recent fire that comes to mind is Grenfell Tower, but it's larger than you'd normally use wood for.

View on HN

> Timber-framed structures do well in earthquakes, and while they catch fire often enough during construction, once fire sprinklers are installed and people live there, serious residential apartment fires in modern construction are really rare. The most recent fire that comes to mind is Grenfell Tower, but it's larger than you'd normally use wood for

Grenfell Tower was constructed using pre-cast concrete blocks, and was not timber framed [0]. The devastating fire [1] was due to flammable aluminium composite cladding.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

Thanks, what a horrifying story. Amazingly bad materials/design - "Combustible panels with polyethylene were put up on top of insulation...made from polyisocyanurate, which burns when heated, giving off toxic cyanide fumes. ...the gap between the cladding and the insulation worked like a chimney to spread the fire."

Also funny if you consider we have "Fachwerkhäuser" (Timber framing houses) here in Germany which are up to about 800 years old. I would be curious if this will hold true for concrete houses in 500-800 years.

If you build it right, sure. Some roman concrete structures are still standing, and we've had better concrete than them for at least 50-100 years.

That doesn't necessarily make building everything out of it good, but concrete can definitely last a long time.

It's actually debatable if concrete in (most of) modern construction is on par with Roman concrete that lived to this day.

Sure there are compositions that are in fact better, but are they used in common buildings? I think the answer is 'no,' since costs won't cut themselves.

Modern concrete itself is really good. The problem is with all the steel rotting in reinforced concrete.

> If you build it right

Which means very heavy, and only designs that can use gravity to hold them together.

I am pretty sure you don’t want to depend on gravity to hold your home together in an earthquake. “scientists have revised ground accelerations at the two stations to 1.37g and 1.51g [vertical G force]”.

I agree. My point was that 'build it right' in the Roman definition was to use a lot of concrete, no reinforcement, and gravity to hold it all together. It is not really feasible given our expectations for modern buildings.

Rome is an active fault zone. And the Romans knew how to build earthquake-proof structures.

The Colosseum fell because people stole the lead rebar--not because of the concrete.

Grenfell tower was a concrete tower, and it was the synthetic cladding that spread the fire.

I imagine the concern in LA is the massive fires they’re seeing on an annual basis, not so much home fires…

I could see that if such the rule was "within 100 yards of a forest" or something, but that would only cover a tiny fraction of the city.

In California that is defined as the “Wildland/Urban Interface”. That zone has been subject to much stricter building codes since 2008. Timber frame homes are allowed, as other factors (venting, roof material, rain gutters, roof material, siding material, landscaping) are dramatically more important.

The vast majority or LA county homes are not in a WUI zone, so wildfire extent can’t be used as an argument for this.

Los Angeles isn’t seeing massive fires on an annual basis - at least, not the parts of LA that would be affected by this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com