News item: Sheets of Glass are falling from Québec’s Grande bibliothèque:
So what do the Québec authorities do? do they replace the glass? do they sue the architect/manufacturers?
Nope - they just accept that the glass will continue to fall. They’ll build gutters and plant trees to make sure none of the glass hits anyone… :smack:
I guess when the Big Owe and collapsing concrete overpasses are your standards for public works, a few sheets of glass falling aren’t that significant… :eek:
Eh, c’est la vie.
Unless you are crushed by falling chunks of infrastructure, in which case c’est ton funeraille. Whatevs.
What happened in Boston when this same thing went on?
Wasn’t that caused by some sort of pressure problem in the building?
They never saw it coming. 
Daft idiots, but that’s pretty much the way I remember Montreal city politics. The best though is that they would rather pay ramped up liability insurance rates, landscaping fees, construction costs (which of course we know would never increase on a project planned by a city) and the occasional dead gardener than have the problem fixed.
I love how the article describes the size of the glass panels:
Now that’s a useful unit of measure. WTF?
You know, they use that furrin metric system up there in Canadia.
They replaced everything. Look in this article, right above the subsection entitled “Nauseating sway.”
An age-old problem, as witness this 1936 poem by Joseph Malines (only a partial quote):
Roughly two-thirds the size of a medium house window. Duh. 
But what’s that in furlongs per fortnight?
And don’t forget the footcandles!
As Sal Ammoniac’s link states, there was a gag order after the legal settlement and so nobody knows what happened (there are some educated guesses). IMO that was a very irresponsible way to conclude the case in terms of public safety, since other architects & builders are not able to learn from the mistake.
Actually, according to what I read in the media, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (the government society that operates the library), with the construction firm Pomerleau, want to build a buffer zone in order to avoid having glass fall on people, but the borough of Ville-Marie will likely refuse to allow them a permit to build this, since they believe that this solution isn’t safe enough. So we don’t know yet what will be done to solve this problem.
The problem, of course, is that replacing all the glass panels would cost a lot more money.