#concrete #rebar #maintenance #spalling #civic-engineering #architecture #capitalism-in-decline #cohost-repost
2022-12-29

I grew up in the 90s, in the US. the northeast.

by then, the country was already a shambling corpse. Rotting. Things were only ever maintained where people could see it from their cars. More realistically, management and corporate. the critical path of the building immaculate, the rest dripping lymph and cerebrospinal fluid, bones jutting out at the wrong angles.

All over, rebar rusting through concrete in ways I now mean they're compromised.

Lethal, some day, eventually.
I suppose.

it's worse now.

no one maintains any commercial property really. the building was built, sold, sold, sold, somewhere along the way the maintenance schedule was neglected. or more likely, simply lost. no one taught our generation anything. not the one before it either, really. everyone's guessing. eventually it'll fail suddenly and nothing could have been done.

concrete isn't supposed to spall like that.

no one writes anything down where you can know you'll need it

related reading:

title: "@whatnames on cohost"
image: "https://staging.cohostcdn.org/avatar/37842-e8a4a81c-8251-4a19-899a-b0928229e8a4-profile.png"
description: "i'm watching my parents getting laid off from jobs they've had for literal decades in favor of new college graduates. not to say that those graduates aren't worth work, but they don't know, they CAN'T know why that esoteric thing was put together like that. and no one will be there to teach them how to fix it when it breaks."
url: "https://cohost.org/whatnames/post/757507-i-m-watching-my-pare"