China silenced by illegal steel thinning

As rumours emerge of illegal steel thinning in Zhengzhou, all goes quiet on the Chinese front...

One trillion. This is the number of American dollars allocated for infrastructure projects in China over the next five years. Zhengzhou. This is the location of the latest 'stretching' factory in China pulling steel reinforcement rods to illegal diameters and threatening the lives of countless citizens who will use the infrastructure projects constructed using these substandard materials.

This week a surprisingly small article in British newspaper The Times detailed the discovery of illicit practices at a Zhengzhou 'stretching' factory where steel reinforcement rods used in a number of construction projects had been pulled to a thickness below regulatory standards.

The reasons for this are simple - 10mm wide rods can be easily stretched to a thickness of 8.5mm, creating many additional metres of metal then sold on for profit - but the resolution is not. Despite countless assertions from experts that pulling these essential building components to inadequate diameters will weaken a structure and endanger the lives of its users, construction companies in China are still being found operating under such measures.

This is not a new phenomenon however. In September 2011 a number of construction firms in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province were ordered to stop using thin reinforcement rods which had been stretched below regulatory standards, with Liu Lin, Director of the Construction and Real Estate Management Department under the Xi'an Industry and Commercial Administration Bureau explaining: "By making the steel bar thin, both the processing plants and the construction firms decrease their cost, but these bars will do harm to the quality of the building projects."

Similarly in June this year the construction of the Ninghang high-speed railway was rocked by claims that 2.2km of safety barriers had been wrongfully installed using steel rods pulled from 6.5mm to 5.8mm and 8mm to 6.9mm. The groups leading the scheme were fined 100,000 yuan and the contractor, Hongye Traffic Facility from Yiyang, allegedly blacklisted. Reporting on the case, local news site China.org.cn was told by an official that: "The railway's construction slowed down recently and quality inspectors failed to launch intense inspections as usual, which caused the loophole."

Despite the severity of this issue and the immense ramifications it poses to the safety of civilians, none of the engineers, construction firms or steel research institutes WAN appealed to for comment were happy to venture an official opinion, many keen to state that they had little or no knowledge of the matter at hand.

Thinning reinforcement rods is not illegal but when practiced to excess can lead to a reduction in the effectiveness of the metal. Fan Zhong from the China Architecture Design and Research Group clarifies: "Over-stretching the steel bars will cause them to become brittle and weak, and less resistant to earthquakes," a point confirmed by Wu Chengcai, General Engineer at the Shaanxi Provincial Building Research Institute, who comments: "When a building suffers great external force such as an earthquake, the stronger, standard steel bars will 'stretch' as the building suffers the damage, thus slowing the process of its collapse for people to escape. However, the buildings with the substandard, thin steel bars will collapse very quickly."

With a marked history of earthquakes across the nation, China has upped its building regulations in recent years and yet somehow the practice of illegal steel thinning has continued to thrive. The potential human cost of stretching reinforcement rods for backhand cash is inconceivable for the majority of people but this remains a very real threat as China presses forward with an unyielding construction schedule, leaving many questions unanswered.

Sian Disson
News Editor

Plans for $200 million test city released

19 September 2011

International technology development firm, Pegasus Global Holdings, have released plans to develop and build what would be the world's largest technology testing and evaluation center.

Covering 52 square kilometres of open, state-owned land, The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, simply dubbed "The Centre", would be a huge scale, fully-integrated testing and evaluation facility for new and emerging technologies.

Designed to represent the current mix of old and new infrastructure found in most modern U.S. cities, The Center will resemble a mid-sized American city down to the detail: houses, roads, suburban neighborhoods and rural communities would all a part of the project.

According to Pegasus, the purpose of the replica metropolis is to provide end-to-end testing, evaluation and demonstration of new intelligent and green technologies and innovations with the goal of determining the direct and indirect benefits and costs the innovations tested would have on our existing infrastructure.

For example, Pegasus reports that the controlled environment would "permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy."

Other technology fields could also benefit from the city sized laboratory: traffic systems, next-generation wireless networks, smart grid cyber security and terrorism vulnerability could all be tested on the site.

"The idea for The Center was born out of our own company's challenges in trying to test new and emerging technologies beyond the confines of a sterile lab environment," Robert H. Brumley, Pegasus Global's CEO said.

"We saw a global need and stepped up to address it. The Center will allow private companies, not for profits, educational institutions and government agencies to test in a unique facility with real world infrastructure, allowing them to better understand the cost and potential limitations of new technologies prior to introduction.""including energy, transportation, telecommunications, security, and agriculture."

What will ostensibly be a man made ghost town, the $189 million project will reportedly derive its revenue from access charges and user fees as well as from the sale of excess utility output, such as power generation, water treatment, and wireless infrastructure.

Pegasus anticipates 350 direct jobs and 3,500 indirect jobs will be created throughout the project. Governor Susana Martinez commented on the economic possibilities that the project could create:

"I am confident this innovative project would provide a great boost to New Mexico's economy," said Governor Martinez.

"We are pleased to be able to offer the resources, open spaces, and talented workforce required to make this effort a success. My administration is committed to an ongoing relationship with Pegasus that will allow the Center to thrive and create New Mexico jobs."

Such an enormous project takes an equal amount of planning and consultation: a Memorandum of Understanding with the State of New Mexico has been undertaken to facilitate the quantification of the feasibility, scope and scale of The Center.

With the assistance of the State of New Mexico, Pegasus and its partners will conduct a feasibility report over the next five months to "analyze all aspects of location, evolution, construction, operation, financial viability and economic impact on the area where The Center may be located."