Hi all.

Every time a building in Nairobi or elsewhere collapses, we always blame it on:

1. insufficient/poor structural designs
2. under-reinforcements
3. boga concrete mixes
4. inadequate curing period
5. wanting supervision

it came to my notice the other day that nobody has ever talked about the quality of sand that we use in the structures construction...yes the sand...

as i was traversing the Roysambu junction at around 9:00am in the morning sometime back, on my way to Kasarani , right opposite the police station i saw a truck full of sand and some kyms were busy unloading it.

when i took a closer look at the sand it was not a normal sand...this was grey i.e a mixture of sand (may be 20%) and cotton soil (80%)...so far so good...

however, the kyms were unloading this grey sand onto another big heap of fairly clean sand and other two fellows on the ground (by this hip) were busy mixing the "two sands"!!!

the resultant sand still looked good and i am quite sure these guys did not stop there...they must have brought in one or two more truckful of bad sand just to bring the clean sand onto the clean/dirty sand threshold...this was possible because the grey sand is readily available in Ruai which is quite near (about 10km away).

the tragedy is that when i returned back through the same route at 4:00pm, there was no sand!! some sucker had already bought it...

if this is what has been happening then half of the buildings in Nairobi are just heaps of stones placed systematically with no binding material at the joints and would not withstand any fairly small seismic earth movements in a scale of 2 on the ritcher...very sand!!!

Thank you for the warning.

hakuna mchanga ya ruai, all sand in ruai comes from outside bro.

precisely...all sand (good sand) come from outside...it just rained recently and the river beds in ruai are now rich in the grey staff...to the end users disadvantage...

may be he meant kbc area of kangundo road..whenever it rains,the water washes down the sand on its path.. your work is just to come with a spade and collect the sand,and you can easily collect a whole 7tonneful lorry just like that.talk of the meat finding 'wacu' at the shamba!

@kaigz..what about quarry dust from juja?i have seen people use it to plaster flats in kabete area.

may be people use the coarse sand which is the by product of ballast making in mlolongo...it is better than the other superfine powder from juja...