Vulnerability of Existing Steel Framed Buildings Following the 1994 Northridge (California, USA) Ear

Raising engineers’ status Brian Stocker from Canterbury, Kent, has a positive suggestion on the subject and writes: I suppose we should be big enough to hold our heads up in society without the protection of registration or licencing. The reality, I think, is that we are not recognised perhaps as much as we should like to be or maybe deserve to be simply because we are not so protected. I come in contact with numbers of language students from diverse parts of the world who treat me with almost embarrassing respect because I am an engineer. I am just not used to it! Their engineers are all registered.

During a recent sail from the south coast of England to the Mediterranean, using the inland waterways of France, I had the satisfaction of sailing beneath two of France's most impressive suspension bridges. First, one passes under what I believe is still the world's longest main span cable-stayed bridge, Pont de Normandie, completed in 1994, and having a central span of 856m. Shortly afterwards one comes under the somewhat older conventional catenary suspension bridge at Tancarville, having a central span of 608m. Even allowing for the age difference of the two bridges, what immediately strikes one is the relative slenderness of all the superstructure of the Pont de Normandie compared with the rather heavy main cable and stiffening girder of the Tancarville Bridge. At a vantage point midway between the two bridges the network of stay cables of the Pont de Normandie were barely visible to the naked eye, whereas the main cable of the Tancarville Bridge stood out clearly; the road deck girder of the Pont de Normandie was also much less bulky than that of the Tancarville Bridge. This seemed in confict with my own intuitively based prejudices as to the relative efficiency of these two systems. Is it merely that the designers over the intervening 35 years since the completion of the Tancarville Bridge have become bolder, used higher strength materials, or perhaps pushed the bounds of design to their absolute limits? Professor J.G.A. Croll Like many, I had not had an occasion to

Mr R. Stainsby (F) My part in the new industry standard for moment connections was in some technical editing and typesetting, and I do thank the authors for the nice things they say about me. I would like to discuss fully welded beam-to-column connections which form Section 4 of the book. Welding on site is a viable alternative to bolted construction and, if properly organised, can be done in an economic way; I would like to see fully welded connections more in use for frames.