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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qry7AmdIn8&t=328s
They tested it and mass timber columns are rated fire resistant for 3 hours.
Concrete is not entirely immune to fire either. [effects](https://www.edtengineers.com/blog-post/fire-effects-concrete], ratings Conditions and behavior are better known of course, given it's prevalence and use.
In the example building covered by Vox, they built a concrete garage base and concrete cores that made it easier to be approved.
Either way, that's what regulations are for. To ensure that the build is safe enough. There is no absolute safety.
We're also living in an era where regulator bodies have been repeatedly weakened by large companies and interest groups.
Does that fire resistance hold up over a decade, two decades, a century, etc? Even if internationally regulatory bodies are 100% in good hands ... there's no way everybody is using the same blend of wood + fire retardant.
Also how realistic are the laboratory conditions? Do the same testing rules apply if an accelerate has been used to increase the burn rate?
What about the human impact? What's the impact of inhaling smoke off of these? Environmental impact from the gasses inevitably produced?
How repairable is the timber structure in case of fire?
These questions have pretty reasonable answer for steel and concrete because we have decades of experience with it.
I'm not an expert in this space but this seems like an incredibly dangerous gamble to take for not much gain. Concrete and steel are reliable building materials that are mostly issues because of the energy cost to produce them. Fix the energy supply chain and they're about as green as anything else.
This isn't being pitched because it's "better than steel and concrete" it's being pitched as "green" and call me a cynic but if it was actually "better" than concrete and steel and safer than concrete and steel, they would outright say that. Arbitrarily being "more green" with no other information (and being based on a material that is supposed to combust but doesn't), is a huge red flag.