What recently caused a building to collapse in Cologne, Germany?”
The building housing Cologne’s municipal archive collapsed on Tuesday, bringing parts of some surrounding structures down with it. At least two people are missing. Some of the documents housed in the archive date back to the year 922. First they heard loud creaking noises. Then, workers in the Cologne city archive building were ordered to get out as quickly as they could. Shortly afterwards, the entire structure collapsed,bringing down parts of neighboring buildings along with it. The disaster on early Tuesday afternoon took place right in the heart of the city. Eyewitnesses reported huge clouds of dust as the rubble from the building completely covered the street. “The entire intersection was covered in a dark fog,” Paraskevi Oustampasiadi, a local shopkeeper, told the German news agency DPA. “It looked like Sept. 11.” Some 200 fire fighters rushed to the scene. It was unclear whether anyone had lost their lives in the collapse. A police spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE that a married co
Ground anchor failure could have triggered progressive collapse of diaphragm wall which swallowed up the Cologne city archive building say geotechnical engineers Weak ground and a high water table could have contributed to the archive building collapse in Cologne last week. Engineers believe it is possible that ground anchor failure could have led to the collapse of one of the diaphragm walls supporting the area in front of the archive building. The 37m deep diaphragm wall supporting the excavation in the collapse area had been bolstered by ground anchors. Contractors were working on the base slab between the diaphragm walls at the time of the collapse. One British geotechnical engineer said that if an anchor was to hit a pocket of weaker than expected gravels, it could have led to a systematic failure of the wall. “I expect that they [investigators] would be looking at the homogeneity of the soil, the nature of the anchors and the support system and the sequence with which it was inst
