Hard Rock collapse 'was waiting to happen,' OSHA engineer says
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2021
- Steel beams supporting the 16th floor of the ill-fated Hard Rock Hotel project in downtown New Orleans were so “grossly underdesigned” that the deadly collapse of the unfinished building “was waiting to happen,” according to an unreleased OSHA engineering report.
Sources with knowledge of the federal investigation provided WWL-TV with details from an engineering review by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration that was produced last year but never disclosed, not even to Orleans Parish prosecutors considering possible criminal negligence charges.
Those sources say OSHA’s engineer found that 81 beams on the 16th floor did not meet the basic design code to properly support the upper three floors of the structure, the sources said, raising questions about how the design was approved.
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The way this entire situation was handled is a complete disgrace.
Poor planning makes for poor quality. Cut corners and cut funds to profit more is greed energy and made the structure even worse then the cut backs. Negativity from the start intentionally done..
I’m with JM, the building inspector should be held responsible as well, that is the one who is supposed to make sure the building is safe
Unless I'm mistaken, the building inspector can only check that the building is being constructed according to the approved engineering and construction plans. But it seems that everyone involved fudged their jobs at least a little in the name of profit. No one deviated from the plans to spend more out of an abundance of safety.
They're focusing on the reduction in the size of the support beams. That was not the problem. The failure did not occur because the beam sheared or a connection broke. It's common for support beams on the top floors to be smaller than the lower floors. The beams also don't bear any of the weight of the floors above them. Anyone who's had an engineering class knows that. The problem would come if the shoring was placed in the wrong spots and put load on those beams when they weren't designed for it. The columns are designed to be load bearing. The last engineer they briefly mentioned at the end of this clip is correct, but I don't understand why they glossed over it. These dummies were trying to rush construction and didn't place the shoring correctly or allow the concrete to cure for the proper time to reach the required strength to add the load above it. The shoring on the 15th floor was bearing the weight of all three floors above it. If the inspector had done her job, she surely would have caught that. Any QC guy would have caught it. A field engineer that passed the FE exam would have caught that. This was incompetence by the GC and by the city inspectors.
God bless those that paid for this with their lives and the injured. I suppose the most important thing is to LEARN from this tragedy, so that it NEVER happens again.
All i can say is injuries and casualties would have been LOTS worse if construction had gone through😳 corruption in the building industry is why i got out
His analogy with the PVC and straw was wrong. You can use straws to hold the board as long as you use several of them to distribute the load.
No, his demonstration validates what they found in the actual as-built conditions. They did not add enough columns (straws) to support the floor loads and to make it worse, they reduced the size of ALL of the columns along that exterior line. The engineer that came up with this re-design should have his license revoked and should have been brought up on criminal charges, but a grand jury declined bringing criminal charges. The other thing in this building design that doesn't make sense is there were no secondary steel beams spanning between the primary beams connecting column to column. See the 5:02 mark in the video - primary beams spanning nearly 30' from column to column but no secondary beams spanning from main beam to main beam.
Someone didn’t read Principles and Practices of Commercial Construction Chapter 6 Formwork
Just unreal,that they had bluprints in thier hands the whole time,so they knew there was no way the 16th floor would hold all that weight above with half the beam strenght than the lower half of tge buildng....who the heck,and what the heck,,the inspectors could have never been on site after the 16 floor went up,,no way they would put themselves tbere.
I was near by when this happened when the crain put the pool on the roof the whole building went down God the families of the lost
When a building COLLAPSES like that is it supposed to do so at FREE FALL SPEED and directly in its own FOOTPRINT ... you know, just like that day when BOTH World Trade Towers did as well as BUILDING 7 🤔
Not necessarily. The World Trade Centers went down from progressive collapse when ALL of the joist girders spanning from the central core to the exterior walls of the towers failed due to the fire. Once the first floor went, it went down on top of the floor below, then the whole thing just pancaked to the ground within in its footprint. On this hotel project, the collapse occurred primarily due to the undersized columns and inadequate number of columns just on that one exterior line of the building.
Don’t complain about somebody wanting a 200’ tall building, especially in New Orleans, which sucks. This reporter is a goof.
Only people to Blame is engineer thy be the ones who you need to follow by the blueprint
i hope the developer lost a huge amount of money.