It's called a "LASER"
Posted on 09/03/2013 6:13:46 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A new London skyscraper dubbed the "Walkie Talkie" has been blamed for reflecting light which melted parts of a car parked on a nearby street.
Martin Lindsay parked his Jaguar on Eastcheap, in the City of London, on Thursday afternoon.
When he returned about two hours later, he found parts of his car - including the wing mirror and badge - had melted.
Mr Lindsay said he "could not believe" the damage. The developers have apologised and paid for repairs.
The 37-storey skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street, which has been nicknamed the "Walkie Talkie" because of its shape, is currently under construction.
'Dangerous'
Mr Lindsay, director of tiling company Moderna Contracts Ltd, said: "I was walking down the road and saw a photographer taking photos and asked, 'what's happening?'
"The photographer asked me 'have you seen that car? The owner won't be happy.'
"I said: 'I am the owner. Crikey, that's awful.'"
The wing mirror, panels and Jaguar badge had all melted, Mr Lindsay said.
"You can't believe something like this would happen," he added. "They've got to do something about it.
"It could be dangerous. Imagine if the sun reflected on the wrong part of the body.
"On the windscreen, there was a note from the construction company saying 'your car's buckled, could you give us a call?'"
In a joint statement, developers Land Securities and Canary Wharf said: "We are aware of concerns regarding the light reflecting from 20 Fenchurch Street and are looking into the matter.
"As a precautionary measure, the City of London has agreed to suspend three parking bays in the area which may be affected while we investigate the situation further."
Mr Lindsay said the developers had apologised and agreed to sort out the £946 repair costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
DANG!
I guess the Indians are making the Jags out of plastic!
At least they were polite enough to leave a note and pay for repairs
What part would not be the wrong part?
Architects don’t have software for ray tracing?
OK now who designed this and DIDN’T think the side was going to act like a giant magnifying glass?
Its even angled downward for maximum frying down below
They are going to have to angle every single pane of glass upwards, or something
I think I’d take up the issue with Jaguar before I blamed it on a building. What kind of cheap plastic are they using in those things now days?
It's called a "LASER"
Seems to me that the problem is more with the quality and material of the car's components than with the building reflecting the light.
yes and they always analyze large structures for such things. Most likely the glass spec’d has been changed. Easy fix - they can switch out to another type since it is still under construction and add some solar film to the existing sections. This actually happens a lot. Where I live several homes in a new development were melting their neighbor’s vinyl siding due to the windows. Developer had to replace the windows and vinyl siding.
When I walk my dog some evenings, just one window (one of those high tech coated ones) of a house on the route provides a striking degree of warmth to me while passing on the sidewalk.
Take a look at the pictures of the building with the article. One end of the structure forms a gigantic concave mirror.
The Jaguar must have been parked at, or very near, the focal point.
In that case, it sounds to me like maybe the houses were built too close together.
But, there's another case of reflection from a skyscraper causing problems in Dallas. It's not melting plastic, but killing plants in a nearby atrium:
The problem is not simply reflected sunlight. The building has a concave shape which concentrates that reflected sunlight. Concave shapes are fairly unusual in architecture.
Unless the building was designed by a cartoonist, I cannot imagine any competent architectural firm (as opposed to a single designer) submitting such a building as a proposal, let alone constructing one.
There are plenty of CAD rendering programs with ray tracing capabilities which, when coupled with annual solar path data for that location & orientation, could have predicted the exact path and intensity of the focal point for any day of the year.
A number of people made a series of major mistakes. Rectification will be costly.
More info here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23944679
His heinous, the Right Reverend Al Gore (Church of Climate Catastrophy) is currently in strategic discussions with architects to assure that these “focal points” are directly on or very near any long term temperature recording units installed by the UN.
Can we attach the frickin’ building to some frickin’ sharks?
LOL!!
When I worked in the city, the non-manager staff had to park in an open lot with no roof.
There was a beautiful old building across from it with a gold metal dome at the top-it was pretty big and painting it took a long time due to it’s shape and height. It was an historic building, so they were always doing something to it for maintenance purposes.
One day, when the wind was blowing constantly with gusts up to 30-40mph, they decided to paint it-with a sprayer.
Yup...wind + paint spraying= disaster.
When we all went to our cars at 4:30 to go home, every car was covered with lovely little specks of gold-leaf paint.
Needless to say, they were held responsible and had to pay to get each car painted-about 100 cars-and that was just our lot. (I had just bought a brand new black car and was kind of diggin’ the new look, but was told it may harm the paint later on.)
Turns out they were using Manpower temps too to try and get around using Union guys: always wondered if the Union paid the temp to do that to teach the building owner a “lesson”...but they would never do that! ...x-treme/s
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