On May 18, 2021, the Sage Tower (center) on Sage Square in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, shook significantly, sparking public opinion at home and abroad.
Shenzhen Saige Building has been officially closed on the 21st because of the shaking for several days in a row. A woman who works in Sage told the land media that the building had been shaking briefly for several days since May 13, causing dizziness and discomfort, and that the shaking of the building became obvious after the 18th, causing panic. Some land media reported that about 6 years ago, Sage also shaking once, but not so obvious.
On May 21, local time, Shenzhen Saige Building posted a notice addressed to Shenzhen Saige Group Co., Ltd, officially announcing that from 00:00 on the 21st, all owners, merchants and tenants of the Saige Building office building and electronic market access will be suspended until the completion of relevant testing work to be notified of the opening.
In the afternoon of May 18, after the 355-meter-high Shenzhen Saige Building suddenly shook, thousands of people inside the building fled in fear, and the scene was quite shocking. The reporter of the land media Extreme News searched on Weibo that day and found that a netizen had posted a microblog as early as May 13 at 10:08 pm that he felt the shaking of the building when he was working on the 57th floor of the Saige Building.
(Screenshot of the microblog)
At 5:00 p.m. on May 19, Ms. Xu, who sent the above microblog, was interviewed by a reporter from Extreme News at her office on the 57th floor of Sage. She recalled that she did feel the building shaking on May 13, when she and her colleagues felt a little dizzy. She tweeted that day to see if others felt the same way, but no one responded. Ms. Xu also thought it might be her own illusion, and thus did not tell the property management office this information.
Ms. Xu said, in fact, in the days after the 13th, the building had a short period of shaking, each shaking about 10 seconds, so that people feel dizzy discomfort. It was only after the very obvious shaking of the building on May 18 that Ms. Xu was sure that she was not mistaken.
On the 18th, all the people in the building once panicked and fled, after a few businesses in order to ship to customers on time, and risked returning to the building to deal with the goods, and the building in the 19th and 20th again obvious shaking, a number of building merchants said that the shaking occurred at about 12:30 on the 20th, in the 35th floor, 55th floor, 60th floor and many other floors can be clearly felt.
According to the land media “Daily Economic News” reported on the 20th, the media reporter went to Sage Building on May 19, Sage Group insiders said that the preliminary identification by experts, “tremor” is the cause of the building shaking, at present, the main structure of the building is still safe, so merchants can still go in and out to pick up goods.
In order to confirm that the building shaking is not a big deal, the person said: “six or seven years ago when the typhoon also shaking once, but not so obvious, after also returned to normal.”
Public information shows that the Sage Plaza building is located in the busy Shennan Middle Road and Huaqiang North Road intersection, completed in 1999. The building has a total height of 355.8 meters, 75 floors above ground and 4 floors underground, with a total construction area of 170,000 square meters. The building was once the third tallest building in Shenzhen and one of the tallest steel pipe and concrete buildings in the world, creating the so-called “Shenzhen speed” of building a floor in 2.7 days, which was a national sensation back then.
However, after the apparent shaking of SEG 18, some Chinese netizens turned up a master’s thesis entitled “Shenzhen SEG Plaza Construction Project Analysis”. The thesis, published in 2001, was devoted to discussing the problems that arose during the construction of the Saige Square, and was written by Jin Dianqi, who was studying for a master’s degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology at the time.
In this dissertation, Dengqi Jin described his involvement in the entire process of the construction of the Saige Plaza. According to the thesis, although all the preparatory work for the Saige Square project was completed long ago, the construction unit of Saige Building started construction before the complete construction drawings of the whole building were available after the foundation part of the underground diaphragm wall and dug pile construction was completed. After that, the “design-and-construct” approach continued until the structural works of the Sage Tower were completed.
Part of a paper written by Ms. Kim on the construction process of the Sage Tower. (Screenshot of Twitter page)
In the paper, Ms. Kim also revealed that the construction drawings were constantly revised, causing the antenna production and installation to stop and wait for the drawings. However, after the construction of the antenna was completed on September 30, 1999, the pedestrians on the ground found the antenna of the Sage Tower was swaying violently, while the wind was fine in Shenzhen at that time and there was only a gentle breeze, which turned out to be caused by a calculation error in the design of the antenna and resonance.
Jin Dianqi said in the paper, “Fortunately, it was on a breezy day, if it encountered a strong typhoon, the consequences would be unimaginable.”
Afterwards, the construction unit first cut off the top 26 meters of the antenna, and then installed 13 meters after recalculation, and made partial modifications, before the danger was lifted.
Now, the relevant content revealed in this paper published 20 years ago, has attracted special attention. The public opinion circles questioned: when the design and construction at the same time for the sake of speed, could it have planted the hidden danger of unknown defects, which became the root cause of the shaking phenomenon of the building 20 years later?
A Chinese netizen posted on Twitter that he was in construction and knew the Chinese construction market well. To build a building, it takes 43 days to repair a floor under normal circumstances to ensure that the cement strength reaches the qualified standard. But in the actual construction, real estate companies often require the construction site in 7 days to build a floor, so the quality of the building in the end, can be imagined.
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