A good point

[Danger Dave]

Galloping Gertie was a fluke and it occured before a lot of studies were done on vibrational loading - the wind loads (remember what I said about how bad they could be?) set up a harmonic oscilliation that happened to be at the bridges natural frequency, so it continued to grow, until it collapsed. The weird part to me was that nobody closed the darn thing down! Even with it moving up and down like that, people still thought it was safe to drive down it! Man, are people stupid, reckless, or what???

I heard that there was research being done on developing weapons to create vibrations at the natural frequency of structures, which are uniqe to the structure. The structure in question would vibrate to pieces, leaving the bldg next door undamaged... As far as I know, it never got past research - there are much cheaper ways to flatten something.

Well, if we can't live in concrete, we gotta chop down more trees! Or how about styrofoam? How much would a styrofoam house cost? It would be easy/cheap to heat and cool, watertight, unlikely to crush you if it collapsed... But I guess tornadoes would be a bit rough on 'em. On the plus side, it would look like it was snowing afterwards .

 

[G-Freeman]

On thread: The current media generally is only concerned about human life when it seems to fit a specific agenda which is basically controlling everybody collectively. Nature is a bigger force to cage. Off thread: I remember a geomorphology professor who first showed me Crater Lake. This paticular explosive volcano was pretty big. Rocks the size of houses have been found from this event - in Kansas. Mt. St. Helens was a pimple in comparison. However, Mt. Shasta could become the Big Kahuna. Won't matter how tall your house is if rocks the size of librarys come raining down from 500 miles away. Ain't the Earth cool?