What caused it? Just spontaneous catastrophic failure?

Also, this thread is useless etc.

Yes, it just exploded. A door did the same thing a few months ago.

The IRA almost destroyed the building 10 years ago in the Docklands bomb. It was repaired, and we still have the same air-con and lift systems (which both break down on a regular basis - false economy, perhaps?).

But it looks as if the building is trying now to destroy itself, bit by bit ...

And there's no chance of pictures, the uploading of anything onto our system is strictly verboten.

???????? This sounds very bizarre. And dangerous. Windows and doors exploding for no apparent reason? I assume the door was also glass? What could cause this? Are you located on shifting ground or something?

There's a huge amount of construction work going on both next door and directly across the road, heavy-duty skyscraper building. Also the DLR thunders by every few minutes. I suspect vibrations from both might be to blame, coupled with perhaps a weakness in the glass.

Or maybe it wasn't an IRA bombing, maybe it was a magical explosion that was covered up by the government? Some of that explosive stuff could have gotten stuck in a space-time loop and is now starting to go off bit by bit.

Yes, I think this building you work in might be contaminated with some bad magic. This would also explain the lifts and air conditioning breaking down all the time.

I bet the building is sagging a little, thanks to the vibrations and occasional bomb. I've seen this happen to sliding glass door in older houses... they were always safety glass, though, so they shattered but the glass remained in place.

Yikes!

If it was a conventional glass brick wall, that failed due to compression stress, or wracking, especially if any of the glass bricks themselves shattered, the situation could be very grave. Glass brick walls are rarely used as a load bearing walls, but they are fairly stable and strong themselves, so a catastrophic failure like this points to some serious underlying problems needing the immediate attention of a structural engineer.

I bet you'll be working from home for a while in the near future, essexjan.

Also, this thread is useless etc.

Is this a joke?

yep!

Wow, that is a great fear of mine. Glass walls and glass doors always bring to mind those action movies - they're always breaking in action movies.

Further clarifcation Re: chrismear's comment and taz's link:

≡ Click to see image ≡

that is scary especially after the office has been attacked once already! Glad everybody is OK.

Ah, I was thinking some over zealous mefite was here trying to ruin our party. That makes more sense now!

Did it break into several sharp shards, or into basically a large amount of little bits?

If the latter, the glass was tempered. (It almost certainly was, btw.) Temper glass is much stronger than untempered -- basically, you shrink the skin of the glass, which puts the whole sheet into compression. Glass is very very strong in compression, having the whole sheet in compression on multiple axis makes temper glass very tough.

However, there is a weak spot in temper glass. If you break the skin, even a scratch, the whole sheet shatters. One of the rite of passage for glaziers is to have the shop boss lay down a sheet of temper glass and have the rookie cut it. Usually, it shatters the moment you score it, but sometimes it'll last until you try to break it along the score line, leaving you with a handful of glass bits and a bunch of cleanup work to do.

A common failure mode in glass walls is sunlight -- the sun hits the glass, it expands in the frame, and presses against something in the frame -- a screw head or whatnot. Enough force chips the edge, and the glass falls apart. It is often quite loud.

The reason we use temper glass? Glass walls would need to be three to four times thicker to be able to stand, and temper glass breaks into lots of little bits that won't do much hard. Regular glass breaks into jagged edges.

Car windows, for this reason, are mostly temper glass. The exception is the front windscreen, which is a laminate glass -- too many rocks hit the windscreen, temper glass doesn't last, and the laminate keeps all the glass bits together -- laminate glass is two pieces of glass epoxied together with a tough plastic membrane in between. Cutting it isn't trivial - you have to score both sides, pop it, then cut through the tough laminate. The usual trick for that is to pour isopropyl into the crack and set it on fire, then when the flame die down, cut it with a razor.

A long time ago, we had a rack full of about 30 some large sheets of .5" thick temper glass for glass walls at an office. Sunlight it it, it expanded, and a sheet in the center let go. The force broke the two sheets in contact with it, they exploded, broke the sheets next to them.

In a quarter second, many thousands of dollars of temper glass was a big pile of very coarse sand.

eriko, that was positively edumacational! So is it simply not possible to cut temper glass without it breaking apart? Do you have to manufacture in just the right sizes, or what?

Ah, I was thinking some over zealous mefite was here trying to ruin our party.

Shit, they're onto me...

We had a glass table break on our patio once. It was that frosted glass, and when it broke, it broke into a trillion little pieces. We woke up one morning and it was laying on the chairs and the ground, like beautiful frosting, or something.

Yes, it was tempered glass. And, apart from my normal 'working from home' days, it won't make any difference to me. They haven't even moved the people whose desks are next to it.

Do you have to manufacture in just the right sizes, or what?

Yep. You take regular glass, cut and/or mold to the size you need, drill holes if needed, then run it through the annealing oven. If it survives, it's now tempered. Turns out that if you run the glass through at the right rate, you break almost no glass -- but if you accept 3-5% breakage during cooling, you actually end up producing more glass per hour.

Jan, the same office our company was in. We moved.

Yikes! That must have been scary.

I wondered for a minute if you worked on Hill Street Blues. One of the few cliches in which they indulged was the fight that went through the glass partition ...

I used to work at CNA Financial, here. The building had problems with the windows, and sometimes they would crack from wind pressure, but apparently there was no overall plan to deal with it.

Then one day a window just shattered, and a glass shard the size of a man fell to the sidewalk, where it decapitated a woman walking with her granddaughter. Horrible accident, horrible, and the company was rightly sued (but settled). They kept netting over the sidewalks for a couple of years until the problem was resolved (all new windows, new fittings, basically).

Unrelated -- once, during a late-night storm (I was on an IT team that had 24/7 presence), a rope hanging off a scaffold (they were painting part of the building gray, the little version of the building on the left in the bottom pic) smashed into the window of our server room and we had a gash open up letting in wind and rain. Fun! I had to rush in there to salvage months' worth of organized paperwork before it got blown every which way. Then we just sort of closed the door.

The security guy who came up said there had already been a broken window farther down the building, and ours wasn't as bad. Ohhhhkay ....

It was really weird working at night next door to a 20th floor room with wind howling under the door.

When I was at high school, they built a fancy new science complex with a huge fishtank as one of the walls. About a week after the complex was opened, the fishtank burst, drenching a couple of students and scaring the hell out of them.

poor fish...