Saturday, November 23, 2013
Gaia kills
A supermarket roof collapsed in Latvia, killing 52 people. The roof wasn't just any old roof: it had been covered with a garden in an attempt to be fashionably Gaian.
Flat roofs are inherently bad even without a garden. They can collapse under extremely heavy rain or snow, but this event was purely human-caused.
Every roof needs to get rid of water quickly. Flat roofs require much better design and much more maintenance to prevent trapped water; when maintenance of the drains falls short, the roof falls. A garden sabotages proper drainage. Ordinary rain can saturate the soil and create an unanticipated long-lasting load, with no way to get rid of it.
Sidenote: This is being described as the worst disaster in Latvia in many decades. That's a pretty good advertisement for a country. If 52 deaths is an unprecedented tragedy, you must be doing a lot of things right.
Labels: Carbon Cult
¶ 5:22 AM
