Part Of The Job

An extreme example of the not-uncommon engineering problem of moving a building: Dutch Engineers Move Massive Historic Swedish Church Three Miles Away. The linked article by Rain Noe is a good overview; there is a bit more detail at the website of the engineering/contracting company: Mammoet.¹

The church is wood-framed, and that helped: a wood structure is more forgiving of vibration and small amounts of forced differential than a masonry one. That in no way reduces the effort required in design and construction for work like this.

A sentence that jumped out at me from the article was “Two engineers sat inside the church, to listen for cracks, as it rolled towards its new site.” Been there, done that. On one occasion, as new steel in a historic building was being jacked up to transfer load to it from the old structure, I was a few feet away to watch the monitors set up to check for movement that would indicate over-jacking; on three other occasions, I’ve been underneath where load tests were being performed, to talk to the surveyors monitoring deflection and to generally watch for damage.

There are at least two aspects to this. The practical one is that remote monitoring can only get you so far, and having a trained engineer on location makes it more likely that damage will be noted as it happens. The philosophical one is that structural engineers expect other people to trust their safety to our analysis and designs, so the least we can do is trust our own safety to our work as well.

1. A heavy-construction and design firm named “Mammoth” is more apt than most companies named after animals. ↩︎