Plywood's cheap and plentiful. Brick is expensive and difficult to get in a lot of parts of the US. Also, in California plywood homes tend to outlast brick ones. I think it has to do with flexing instead of breaking in earthquakes.
Mythbusters cannonball ‘myth-fires’
If non-US readers have ever wondered how far the Alameda County bomb disposal range (beloved of Discovery Channel show Mythbusters) is from homes, it seems it’s at least close enough for a misdirected cannonball to hit a house. And then another house, a hill and a car. Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are red- …
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Thursday 8th December 2011 19:34 GMT HCV
Brick in quakeland
The day after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, I drove through a neighborhood 10 or so miles from the epicenter, with lots of houses made of "chicken wire", basically the same construction as the house in question.
They all withstood the quake nicely, except that many of them had piles of reddish-pink dust next to them that used to be their brick chimneys.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 19:35 GMT Kevin 6
not all
I can say my house is made of brick, along with 90% of the buildings I've seen traveling through the city so its not all ;)
As others have said brick is nice vs high winds, and such but very BAD to earthquakes. Few years back we had a very minor earthquake (2nd I can remember in 30 years). It was so minor I mentioned that it felt like we had an earthquake, and generally they said I was nuts till they turned the news on a little later where it was said we had one....
Afterwards we found out the house had well over $8,000 in damage to the brick work from it shifting that wasn't covered by insurance cause it wasn't immediately noticed till we noticed leaks when it was raining.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 23:22 GMT Franklin
"Is it just this one, or are all US houses constructed from chicken wire, bin bags and hair clippings?"
I spent most of my adult life in southwest Florida, where (for hurricane reasons) houses are built from cinder blocks that are strapped down to the ground quite tightly. Not only are they proof against hurricanes, they tend to hold up quite nicely to just about anything else you can throw at them. Fire, tanks, zombie apocalypse...
When I moved to Oregon two years ago, I was horrified and appalled to see houses made of plywood and, I don't know, old newspapers or something. My girlfriend's been mocking me relentlessly about it, but every time I walk upstairs I can't help but feel if I lean against the wall the whole damn house will fall down. (Wood? Really? Who builds houses out of WOOD?)
She did, however, make one valid point: Rigid brick or cinder block houses don't fare well in earthquakes, which we get in Oregon in place of hurricanes. Brick or block houses tend to fracture, or so I'm told, whereas wood houses are flexible enough that they just kinda sway a bit.
Personally, I still feel safer in a house that isn't made of wood.
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Friday 9th December 2011 10:46 GMT LateNightLarry
Picture here...
In areas prone to earthquakes, such as most of California, brick construction is generally not used because the bricks tend to separate when the walls are shaken sufficiently strongly. Building codes in CA do allow brick, but it has to be tied together with rebar or other metal devices to keep the bricks from separating. The owners of many old structures which were built of brick or stone are being required to retroactively reinforce the walls (can be VERY expensive) to prevent them from falling down, or if the walls cannot be reinforced, they owners may be required to tear the building down... The law applies to buildings with historical significance as well...
In the last relatively significant earthquake in California's Napa Valley, entire neighborhoods saw their brick or "slumpstone" (looks like adobe bricks but made of cement) chimneys badly damaged or destroyed because they weren't reinforced.
Many houses, maybe the majority, are built with plywood shear walls, then the plywood is covered with chicken wire and then the wire is covered with stucco... That's probably what Chris is seeing.
Beer, cause it's the closest icon available to a wine glass.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 13:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
This isn't a toy
Was a less populated region unavailable? How much intelligence does it take to do this in an area devoid of civilian population with an radius, AT A MINIMUM, of the firing distance? I'm surprised they weren't arrested for reckless endagerment or destruction of property, but they're a commercial enterprise, so the laws are applied differently. They're just extremely lucky they didn't kill or injure anyone.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 15:56 GMT admiraljkb
In fairness, a civilian bomb range probably wasn't the spot to do cannon testing. The Dahlgren Proving Grounds comes to mind for somewhere that is properly setup to handle cannon testing. There probably is a closer Army or Naval facility that is setup to handle cannon testing of the type they were doing.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 15:58 GMT laird cummings
When you get right down to it, mombs don't send fragments all that far. The range is well-designed - as a BOMB RANGE. As an artillery range, it's *entirely* inadequate.
The problem, from the production crew's perspective, is, real artillery ranges are 1) far away, 2) hard to gain access, and 3) expensive to operate. So they cut corners massively, instead. The proper techinque, in the case of using the bomb range, would have been to built a shot-trap - a virtual cage of sand or other dense, soft material that could stop any concievable projectile at any concievable angle the cannon could fire. But that costs money, too - Again, corners were cut.
The Mythbusting crew suffered from arrogance and ignorance - Arrogance that they think they have enough knowledge and smarts to defeat random chance, and ignorance of artillery - They didn't bother to consult *real* experts in smoothbore artillery, or if they did, they disregarded their advice.
A six-pound cannon of Napoleonic or American Civil War vintage has a MAXIMUM range of approximately 4000 yards - just a bit less than 4 kilometers. Their 30-pounder..? Who would know, without some serious testing? Which, of course, they didn't do properly - nor did they employ the right kind of people to DO that testing.
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Friday 9th December 2011 10:53 GMT LateNightLarry
This isn't a toy...
There are not very many "less populated" areas within a reasonable driving distance of the Mythbusters office, and the ones that are nearby are generally unsuitable for other reasons, such as tidal marshes, wetlands or other problems with the neighborhood. To actually get to a sufficiently unpopulated area, they would probably have to drive to somewhere in Nevada or Utah... say the Bonneville Salt Flats, over five hundred miles.
Beer, cause it's the closest thing to a glass of wine.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 12:01 GMT Dave Bell
It sounds as though they tried this in totally the wrong place, but I'm not sure what the right place would be. A smoothbore cannon firing a 30-pound shot was seriously heavy artillery, the sort of weapon used by the heaviest ships of the line. Any firing range has a "danger-space" behind the targets, and this incident shows why.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 14:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bisley...
...it was only a couple of years back when they banned .338 being used there.
Because someone worked out you could reach the housing estate that was built other the other side of the safety area.
They almost banned .308win about a year after that, because if you had the right bullet weight and shot it precisely at an elevation of (guessing here) 32.253 degress it could just reach them.
I mainly remember this as it was about two weeks after I spent a grand on a new 308, and was getting very P'ed off with the NRA.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 12:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Epic and stupid failure
A lot of people consider this to be very funny but I think some authorities might want to double check on how the rules were applied and followed up here. Because I don't think its much fun if you're sleeping at home (perhaps with a new born?) and end up having to move with the whole family to a hotel because your house needs to be repaired.
The reason why I consider this an epic fail will show very clearly when you check up with Google maps on the scenery. It becomes horribly obvious that the crew has ignored the very basic rule of firing a weapon; don't aim the weapon in the direction of a residential area, no matter how far it is away.
Check the maps; a simple quarter turn would have made sure that this wouldn't have happened.
A bomb disposal range? I know they used that location many times, but what was the logic behind it? A bomb will be the center of an explosion thus the force of the explosion will divided over all sides; minimizing the risk that the shockwave will eventually find its way outside the perimeters.
Firing a weapon on the other hand is totally different; you send an object with a massive force behind it hurtling into one /single/ direction, thus no division of power.
Can't be that hard to conclude that the idea to fire a very potentially high powered weapon on a terrain made for bomb explosions isn't the best idea? Why not talk with the military and use firing ranges for this kind of stuff; a tank firing range for example?
I know its easy to talk after the facts, but since they claim to do things professionally I think we have every right to be critical here.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 13:25 GMT FutureShock999
yeah, but...
As a professional shooter of long-range rifles, I heartily agree with NEARLY everything you say above. A very good summary of the situation, and their poor planning. The range where I fire at 1000 yard targets has MILES of uninhabited forests as a safety range, and is totally closed to any human access (it's been a military firing area for decades).
But I fear that you lost me when you said "perhaps with a new born?". It is totally correct that baby's hearing is more easily damaged by loud noises that an adults, and thus are more vulnerable to even a near miss. But frankly, one more use of "think of the children!" we really didn't need...
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Thursday 8th December 2011 14:15 GMT Tom 13
Since they have to sign an agreement with the government
every time they use the range, and always discuss in detail with same the nature of what they are going to do at the range, don't you think maybe someone there should have thought of that as well?
They have been responsible about manning up after the fact, which is a lot more than I will say for many people.
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Thursday 8th December 2011 14:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
"It becomes horribly obvious that the crew has ignored the very basic rule of firing a weapon; don't aim the weapon in the direction of a residential area, no matter how far it is away."
Well, that's practically impossible.unless you shoot everything up into the air which is probably more dangerous. Also don't use semi-colons, ever.
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