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Sustainable building effort reaches new heights with wooden skyscrapers
(yaleclimateconnections.org)
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Environment
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NEVER live in one of these holy shit... There's a damn good reason wooden skyscrapers aren't a thing: FIRE.
They say in the article that this "mass timber" is considered "good enough" but personally I would not want to trust my life to that.
I live in a country where single family homes are built with wood. Everyone seems to trust their life to that. I don't know why it would be different in an apartment.
Because these are literal sky scrapers. Fire on a wood structure is a recipe for catastrophic failure. A fire in a large structure could have similar effects to those large high rise condos that collapsed in Florida from poor maintenance.
This is very likely dangerous deregulation of the fire code to cut costs being "green washed" as a new thing that needs a hell of a lot more scrutiny. Building large structures with wood WAS a thing in the past, it was outlawed because it's EXTREMELY dangerous when one of those structures ignites.
They're only getting away with it because these are composite timbers which have been "tested" to be safer. I'm very skeptical that those tests are comprehensive, at least to the point where I would feel comfortable spending a significant portion of my life in one of these buildings.
It's not unheard of to make some pretty impressive structures of wood, I'm thinking of some of those big pagodas in Asia that have been around for who knows how long. That said thought does have a lot of significant challenges with fire being right up there. I can't fathom how they would deal with things like lightning. Lightning rods exist but is that enough to not explode wood the same way a struck tree does?