BUILDING BESIDE A HIGHWAY

By Jonsig Eirik

The story I am about to tell you is true; it had serious

consequences, the cause was little understood by most, ridiculed
by the ‘know it all’ who wondered why he got wet if he stood in
the rain.

Shortly after WW2, Highway 401 was built through the Fraser
Valley farming belt. A farmer close beside the highway decided to
have an implement shed built, using 8x8x16 concrete blocks,
ideal for the building which was about 32 feet long with the ends
about 20 feet; the front facing the highway was open, to be a
series of sliding doors.

A crew of several bricklayers had the blocks laid almost to a

height of 12 feet when suddenly the back wall collapsed killing
one bricklayer. Nobody knew how such a tragic thing could
happen. These bricklayers were qualified tradesmen; how could
such an unconscionable accident happen? The mortar was
properly mixed. I doubt if anyone came up with the right answer. I
never heard.

Sound has tremendous energy: when I was playing around with

radios, in the thirties when parts were cheap but I still had no
money to buy any, I came across a very interesting article where
General Electric built several large speakers into a wall, wired
them all in phase, and then fed a low frequency sine wave to
these speakers. At a very low frequency they could knock out the
opposite end of the building. A big piece of pie no matter how you
cut it.

First visualize the setting; the 2 west lanes of 401 were not over a
hundred feet from the opening of the building. A semi would pull
out and pass another of a similar make; normal traffic, except
when one passed a situation might be created.

Let’s say for example the trucks were the same make; if they
were both going 60 MPH the diesels theoretically would be
running at the same speed where the sound of their exhaust
would be identical, say 50 hertz per second.

Then the truck following pulls out to pass; the frequency of his
exhaust will increase to, say 53-hertz/sec. Now we have a
phenomenon that’s a fundamental component of any two
frequencies; the difference and the sum of the two. Using the
hypothetical muffler sounds of 50 and 53, we would have 3 hertz
and 103 hertz.

The 103 would do no harm to the building, but the 3-hertz could
start that wall rocking, or it could create a standing wave where a
reflected sound meets one coming in which it can create enough
pressure to break the ‘barely curing’ mortar bond and topple the
whole wall.

This is my theory of why the building collapsed. The low

frequency might have been anywhere in the very low range, well
below what the human ear could detect. My guess is that it was
somewhere between 1/4 and 5 CPS (hertz) considering the weight
of the wall

Mortar can be easily disturbed until it sets, and if the weather is

cold, and the blocks are laid quickly--then you have a recipe for
disaster. Increasing the cement a bit or cutting down on the lime
will help speed up the set but only so much or it gets hard to work
with. I laid a lot of blocks but I was never fast. A hundred blocks a
day was about all I could do; a couple of tons of 8x8x16 blocks? I
get tired thinking about it when now I can barely lift one block
without risking a hernia.

Jonsig Eirik.