A 1700-ton telco building that was relocated while running in 1950
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
The phone companies deal with cable splices all the time (roughly at the rate of backhoe deployment), so they most likely shut down the trunks one-by-one, extended the ones that needed more wire and they may or may not have decided to take up the slack in the remainder (to avoid parasitic inductance and capacitance from rolling up the excess wire).
Fun fact: Kurt Vonnegut's father was the chief architect who recommended rotating the building [2]. Earlier than that, there was also a building that was moved by a team of horses to make way for the Indiana War Memorial, but I can't find a source anywhere (I read about it while touring the memorial).
[1] http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html [2] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...
> Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge.
Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by rising the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)
I think that you will find it is not the "technical experts" who were afraid, but the workers in the building. This is exactly the sort of action that reassures these people, since they see that you have "skin in the game". It is also worth noting that he almost certainly didn't believe that he was placing his wife and child in danger.
This is similar to the Chinese government ordering airline executives to be on a flight on new year's eve Y2K, so they won't cut corners to save money or whatever to make the fixes required.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/news...
Knowing his wife and child were going to be in the building, you can bet he watched the workers like a hawk and triple-checked all the work and every calculation. Without his wife and child there, it's less certain whether he was equally thorough.
Risk is something like likelihood of failure multiplied by consequences of failure. If you increase the consequences some but decrease the likelihood more, you could have a net reduction in risk.
> Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.
I really do not miss all the sex shops and prostitutes, pushers and all around hustlers who used to have a run of the place. I for one am glad they cleaned that up.
There’s some information on Jorge Matute Remus the engineer who designed and ran the building move on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus
They moved and rotated an Indiana Bell building in the 1930s.
Big central offices are massive buildings often with deep basements.
Plus I'd rather move a wooden house than a brick or even a stone one.
Wooden buildings built on piles used to be the standard construction method in New Zealand before poured concrete bases became the norm, so they're relatively easy to move: just chop the piles and jack it up onto a truck.
My parent's friends actually gave a house away for free. They were rebuilding, it it was cheaper to give the house away for free and have the new owners pay to get it relocated, rather than pay for demolition.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/74342852/...
The rest of the town was demolished, and a new one (with same name) was built nearby. Mining has stopped since and there's a giant lake in the old town's area now.
There are several videos about the event, but most of them with Czech commentary only… Still, it's interesting to at least skip around the video [2].
Aerial map of the location: https://en.mapy.cz/s/2pntC (you can switch to 19th century map via the "change map" button).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Assumption_of_th...
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/moved-church-of-most-kos...
The hotel wasn't kept operational, but they didn't strip anything from inside, they even left the bottles in the bar.
When materials to build a new house are phenomenally expensive, and perhaps labor expensive as well, it becomes cheaper to deal with the logistics of moving an entire dwelling intact.
See: https://dailygazette.com/article/2013/05/04/historic-niskayu...
and: https://dailygazette.com/article/2017/09/13/this-is-cooler-t...