I'm having an odd interaction with a third party plan checking service which is reviewing the plans for a prefabricated steel building warehouse/shop space. The space was designed as enclosed: the several roll-up doors of the facility will be open during work hours, and closed the balance of the time.
The plan checker insisted that because the roll-up doors were not "integral to the wall construction of the building" and because there is a "human element" involved in the closure of said roll-up doors, there would be no guarantee that the doors would be closed during a wind event, and therefore had to be considered as openings, thus making the building a partially enclosed building.
Having designed essential facilities that actually are requried to have their roll-up doors be considered as openings (because they'll be used during wind events), I explained that because the doors of our building were designed to resist code-required wind loading, that the client would not open them during a wind event, and that we're not in a flying debris region, the roll-up doors were not considered to be openings, and pointed her to ASCE7-C26.12 to help explain.
I further said that the concept of "human reliance" on closing the doors in anticipation of an extreme wind event as somehow being a problem is not found anywhere in the building code; that roll-up doors are permanently attached to the structure in question via the door header, which is anchored to the door's king posts, which are anchored to the head girt above and foundation below, and are very much "integral" to the construction of the building's walls.
The plan checker unfortunately could not understand the argument, and we're left with no alternative but to involve the Building Official. The client will have wasted a month and hundreds of thousands of dollars in delays and excess costs by the time this is concluded
Looking at ASCE7-22, some of the clarifying verbiage from ASCE7-16 has been removed from the definiton of openings in 26.2. Humble suggestion: add "doors and windows designed to be closed during wind events and to resist the wind loads specified in this standard shall not be considered as openings unless otherwise explicitly required".in its place.
#ASCE7-22#WindandWindLoads------------------------------
Steve Bluhm P.E., S.E., M.ASCE
Structural Engineer
Bakersfield CA
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