> The company that oversees the tower, Sete, which is 99%-owned by the city hall
So that's another thing that's going to be added on the long list of points political opponents are using to say that the current city hall management is doing a poor job at taking care of the city.
The current management's been in place for 8 years already so blaming them for the current situation is fair; if the tower had actually outlived its maximum lifespan, they'd have to start the process of dismantling it.
Aside for the obvious potential tragedy, it would be kind of interesting to see how the Eifel tower collapsing (or any building of similar status) would effect the public image (both internal and external).
Overengineered things will tend to survive. Since they didn't really know how gravity/structural forces work, they would have made some bridges with too much reinforcement and some with too little.
You end up seeing the survivors. Luckily they are also not made of something requiring maintenance like metal.
Your conclusions about what the Romans did and did not know seem dubious. Even in the modern era we still fuck constructions up, despite all we know.
If I recall correctly they had pretty strict standards for the roads themselves [citation needed], I would suspect much the same existed for bridges. Having said that, I think it stands to reason that chemical processes and variances in materials locally sourced would be something worthy of scrutiny. Porting tons of materials in those days would be suboptimal to say the least, so concrete compositions could suffer, alongside with a litany of other material compromises. Add in process errors and I think it becomes a far more compelling hypothesis than "they just slapped shit together but somehow invented keystones, leveraging both structural and gravitational forces"
Knowing what we do know, I think, tends more towards material optimization. We can more confidently design structures and do it with greater respect to cost - something I don't know that earlier civilizations paid a lot of mind to, especially when looking at the multi-decadal constructions of cathedrals for instance or more on point the coliseum.
> Even in the modern era we still fuck constructions up, despite all we know.
That's precisely why we fuck it up, because we know tolerances and such much better, and we can do things with much finer granularity. So we aim to build right at that precise edge of "just barely above what's minimally required for it to work." And when small fuck ups happen, that edge gets lost, and suddenly it is all falling down.
In Roman times? No precise tools and techniques were available, things had far less granularity. So when they decided they wanted to build things "good enough", there was no precise edge. They would often ballpark for a construction project to be much stronger than minimally needed (by modern measurements), precisely because that "minimally needed" wasn't nearly as simple to achieve or even calculate.
Think about medieval brick castles. Some are still standing, while some houses built only about 100 years ago are pretty much disintegrating. Is it because we don't know how to build castles anymore? Not at all, it's just we try to build on the edge of the calculated expected lifespan of a house, balancing pricing at the same time. It was extremely difficult to do something like this with the knowledge available back then, so if they wanted something actually stable, they would often go for an overkill.
My argument is the the Romans had a really good understanding of the macro forces, but minimal knowledge of the micro forces. I would also expect long-run events would be more difficult to parse. The floodlines of Egypt, for instance, required a modern engineer decades of work to model because there is a complex system of dependency undergirding the processes determining them. Prior years flooding determined the latter years, this wasn't integrated into the reasoning when it came to constructing dams, instead they used 100-years floodlines to determine how high to build the dams, which was inadequate for the safety margin. I suspect such errant features of nature might explain failures, and material issues, but I'm definitely confident Romans had a highly intimate understanding of the high-visibility macro forces, because you really just can't miss broken sticks and falling bricks, can you?
A small counterpoint; structures made of a weathering steel, like COR-TEN, don't need to be painted. The trade offs include ensuring the welds weather at the same rate as the structure and needing a salt alternative for de-icing in the winter.
The most prominent example I know of is the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia.
I once watched a travel documentary with Griff Rhys Jones in Paris, where he meets an underground group of people that sneak into official buildings at night and repair things, they apparently have access to pretty much every building in Paris:
It takes 60 tons of paint and needs to be done by hand. The solution for Cathodic protection would have to be, it seems, by covering it in Zinc before the repaint.
I don't think that works on something like a tower. When they use them on ships they change the voltage of the hull relative to the water but the tower doesn't have a continuous body of water to make a circuit.
I'm pretty sure having the Eiffel Tower in view of your window pushes up the value of an apartment. Maybe they should do the opposite and just place about 20 replicas around the city?
That said, the tower was originally intended to be temporary, for twenty year. And con artist Victor Lustig sold the tower to scrap metal merchants—twice.
While we're at it, we should dismantle the Statue of Liberty and the rest of those monstrosities as well, after all, what good are they and the scrap is probably worth a fortune. /s
Funny how such a dire diagnosis lacks any photographic evidence of the damage.
Like just for basic journalism: "We think" is different than, "We know". If it's so bad, wouldn't one be able to casually see some sort of rust/damage from a visit? That would then comfort the leaked documents.
Isn't the situation of photo rights with the Eiffel Tower kinda fucked? Like to the point where picture of the tower at night are copyrighted vs in daylight?
I'd say 'screw that' and publish my pictures anyway. It's in about as public a space as is possible, and I'd love to see them win in court to claim copyright over 3/4 of the night sky of a major European city.
I think the general consensus is that no one's going to get in trouble for posting pictures, e.g. on twitter or instagram or their personal site, but I believe that there have been cases of folks being pursued for using them for commercial purposes. There's definitely a fair bit of people claiming that personal use might also run afoul, but it seems to be the normal baseless panic you see around this stuff rather than anything to legitimately worry about.
Toronto's CN Tower has a nightly "strip" of lights that change and flow, etc. Sometimes you can detect movement, and that is because quite often it is actually showing slices of an image.
This is what it looks like when you make a stream of the lightshow. As far as I know, they never copyrighted it, and it is a super cool way to celebrate various events. For example, on Remembrance Day it shows poppies and other related images. On Canada Day, lots of Canadian images from across the country.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. Rust under paint is still rust. From the article:
> A second report in 2014 by Expiris, an expert paint company, found the tower had cracks and rusting and only 10% of the newer paint on the tower was adhering to the structure. “Even if the general state of the anti-corrosion protection seems good to the eye, this can be misleading,”
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadSo that's another thing that's going to be added on the long list of points political opponents are using to say that the current city hall management is doing a poor job at taking care of the city.
"Linux kernel riddled with Rust and in need of repair, leaked reports say"
As much as there's a tendency for shoddy repairs by some there's also a tendency to be biased towards alarmism by some others.
Stripping four layers of led based paint is some job, no wonder people are reluctant to do it.
Sounds like repainting but addressing areas of corrosion individually might be the best way of going about it
That’s all they do. Repaint it.
Kind of give you an idea of how important maintenance is.
I’m still not certain why all those Roman bridges are still around though.
You end up seeing the survivors. Luckily they are also not made of something requiring maintenance like metal.
If I recall correctly they had pretty strict standards for the roads themselves [citation needed], I would suspect much the same existed for bridges. Having said that, I think it stands to reason that chemical processes and variances in materials locally sourced would be something worthy of scrutiny. Porting tons of materials in those days would be suboptimal to say the least, so concrete compositions could suffer, alongside with a litany of other material compromises. Add in process errors and I think it becomes a far more compelling hypothesis than "they just slapped shit together but somehow invented keystones, leveraging both structural and gravitational forces"
Knowing what we do know, I think, tends more towards material optimization. We can more confidently design structures and do it with greater respect to cost - something I don't know that earlier civilizations paid a lot of mind to, especially when looking at the multi-decadal constructions of cathedrals for instance or more on point the coliseum.
That's precisely why we fuck it up, because we know tolerances and such much better, and we can do things with much finer granularity. So we aim to build right at that precise edge of "just barely above what's minimally required for it to work." And when small fuck ups happen, that edge gets lost, and suddenly it is all falling down.
In Roman times? No precise tools and techniques were available, things had far less granularity. So when they decided they wanted to build things "good enough", there was no precise edge. They would often ballpark for a construction project to be much stronger than minimally needed (by modern measurements), precisely because that "minimally needed" wasn't nearly as simple to achieve or even calculate.
Think about medieval brick castles. Some are still standing, while some houses built only about 100 years ago are pretty much disintegrating. Is it because we don't know how to build castles anymore? Not at all, it's just we try to build on the edge of the calculated expected lifespan of a house, balancing pricing at the same time. It was extremely difficult to do something like this with the knowledge available back then, so if they wanted something actually stable, they would often go for an overkill.
They stood up very well.
Think about that … even against modern artillery, they still held. And with little damage.
A crappy bridge was sacrilegious.
However, a decade ago they repainted it using more expensive paint, which should last two decades.
The most prominent example I know of is the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLkl0r0C1ro (Section starts at 36m in)
Maybe they're already repairing it?
https://www.corrosionpedia.com/definition/1657/sacrificial-a...
The Corrosion Doctors are also on it... :-)
It takes 60 tons of paint and needs to be done by hand. The solution for Cathodic protection would have to be, it seems, by covering it in Zinc before the repaint.
https://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Landmarks/Eiffel.htm
That said, the tower was originally intended to be temporary, for twenty year. And con artist Victor Lustig sold the tower to scrap metal merchants—twice.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/20/priority-french-wr...
"I have breakfast here to save one innocent from tasting Salazar's foul cuisine".
Edit: added /s
Like just for basic journalism: "We think" is different than, "We know". If it's so bad, wouldn't one be able to casually see some sort of rust/damage from a visit? That would then comfort the leaked documents.
https://mymodernmet.com/eiffel-tower-copyright-law/
(You could possibly photograph Tokyo tower which is a near clone of Eiffel tower & slightly taller too)
This is what it looks like when you make a stream of the lightshow. As far as I know, they never copyrighted it, and it is a super cool way to celebrate various events. For example, on Remembrance Day it shows poppies and other related images. On Canada Day, lots of Canadian images from across the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqFMbXMfS9Q
> A second report in 2014 by Expiris, an expert paint company, found the tower had cracks and rusting and only 10% of the newer paint on the tower was adhering to the structure. “Even if the general state of the anti-corrosion protection seems good to the eye, this can be misleading,”