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A resident slices through a structural column on the sixth floor of a twenty-story building to enhance the view.
G
Well, it will improve the view… for the buildings on either side of him.
J
And there will be a really cool memorial park in the neighborhood
S
/r/JesusChristReddit
L
Oh I bet they have a bunch of interesting posts.
A
😥😂
E
Yeah fuck anyone above or below because shits fucked up, how does one think like this? What in his mind made it make sense, like people who cut down structural walls to open up some space, that’s gonna fail and collapse it’s not if it’s when.
R
As above, so below
S
Cause people are stupid.
M
Even if a person is stupid and shortsighted, it would really help to train the thought, “Why doesn’t everyone do this?” into their head. We should all wonder that when we have a stroke of what feels like genius. We usually do not understand all the implications of what we are contemplating. In my case, the worst ignoring that has gone is that I’ve ended up with crappy baked goods or wonky craft projects, though. Not a structural engineering disaster about to happen.
I
because they see themselves as visionaries. “Nobody else thought to do this and since I did it enforces my belief that I am super smart. Since I am super smart if there was a problem doing this I would have thought of this.” It is circular logic that just goes round and round reinforcing itself as it goes.
H
And selfish
S
I don’t see how being a crab has anything to do with it.
L
“it’s a big building, who cares if we remove a little bit of it anyway”
H
Here comes the neat part, they don’t think at all.
X
Will improve his view as well. From above, that is…
N
yup, this is a valid WTF
N
i want to see a proper building inspector or structural engineer react to this vid lol. It’d be beyond WTF for them. It might induce brain aneurysm.
E
I’m a structural engineer and I can confirm that I almost passed out seeing this. This is a code red situation where everybody in the building and the building around needs to be evacuated and measure needs to be taken immediately.
N
i only studied architecture, so i’m curious how engineers would attempt to repair an act of stupidity like this lol. Other than “column shoring” what other entry words should i Google to learn how structural engineers would repair this? Any famous precedent cases i can look up?
P
I”m trying to claw back into my brain and find the news report of the woman who blew the whistle on an apartment complex that was failing. IIRC, the underground parking garage pillars started to crumble and the owners refused to do anything about it. Edit: [Found it!](https://baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2025/05/06/clearwater-condo-building-structure-evacuation-)
S
In sydney we had a similar situation with the Opal Towers, turns out that the builders were so incompetent and got their mates to sign off the construction instead of the government bodies.
F
And as a result there are no real repercussions. No reform. We loosened regulations under the guise of housing crisis needing to build more shitboxes for meriton to make another billion
A
>All 60 residents were evacuated yesterday after a crack was found in a support column >**a crack** They have VASTLY different understanding of the word “crack” because those images show complete structural failure. That shit is crumbling. No, that shit *had crumbled*, past-tense. “A crack” was step 1 in that thing self-demoing, it’s clearly past step 20 or so.
M
At least they evacuated, try reading this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampoong_Department_Store_collapse
D
Jesus Christ, what a piece of shit: >To maximise the floor space, Lee Joon ordered that the diameter of the floor columns be reduced to 60 cm (24 in), instead of the minimum of 80 cm (31 in) in the original blueprint that was required for the building to stand safely. In addition, the spacing between columns was increased to 11 metres (36 ft); with fewer columns, each one had to support a larger load than originally designed. >In April 1995, cracks began to appear in the ceiling of the fifth floor in the south wing, but the only response by Lee Joon and staff management was to move merchandise and stores from the top floor to the basement. >An emergency [board of directors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors) meeting was held when it became clear that the building’s collapse was inevitable. The directors suggested that all staff and customers should be evacuated, but Lee Joon violently refused to do so for fear of revenue losses. However, Lee Joon and the executives left the building safely before the collapse occurred. >At about 5:00 p.m., [KST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_South_Korea) (UTC+9:00), as the fifth floor ceiling began to sink, store workers finally closed off all customer access to the fifth floor. Fifty-seven minutes before the collapse, the store was packed with hundreds of shoppers, but still, Lee Joon did not close the store or attempt any repairs. >During his interrogation with Professor Chung, Lee Joon sparked further controversy by saying that **his main concern was that the collapse** of the store not only harmed the customers, but also **inflicted great financial damage to his company**.
P
Seven years and six months is a ridiculously low sentence when considering he got 502 people killed and a further 1000 wounded.
T
didn’t a building in Miami, Florida collapse for this same reason?
H
Surfside, FL, but it collapsed from poor quality of concrete and lack of maintenance. I live pretty close to there, and unfortunately, they are just building another condo there without turning it into a memorial.
S
Structural engineers don’t generally deal with the fixing side of things; they are involved with higher level stuff like the entirety of the structural matrix at a theoretical level. Like seriously high level maths. There is an entire seperate discipline of construction and civil engineers that deal with the practical side (at least in European system); they would draft a support consideration based on structural masses and types above and below. Then after they got the support sorted, depending on structure type they’d call specific specialists. In case of steel structures someone like me would be involved, where we get the specs for the pillar (for example) that needs to be put in to replace it, we fabricate it according to specs and standards and install it to place according specs and standards. Then after that construction engineer would take over to deal with the concrete cast and seaming specs. But I have swapped out steel pillars in the past in an active structure. You get steel pylons (if the structure has not moved due to pillar related issues), if it has you get pylons and jacks to lift it up. Get carpenters for wide supports and wedges from wood. Then you just cut the pillar out, put new one in, with concrete casting gaps on both ends, and cast it in. Then hold it supported for like 30 days for curing. I’m probably making it sound more complex that it is, but having been involved with them, it is actually fairly uninteresting. However I been involved with some rarther… weird cases. Like there was a case of like 18 metres wide beam that spanned a big structure (like 500×500 mm in size), that wasn’t on it’s bearings and nobody was actually sure what held it up… but we all agreed that it probably should be on the bearings. So I developed a whole method of wedging for that stuff. Basically wedge it in, weld the wedges together and then make a collar around the wedges. **However**. If you want to know more about concrete pillars. Then you can look up stuff about partial demolitions of pillars, collumn repair, and concrete retrofitting and collum jacketing. Those are the methods used. You’ll find lots of weird videos from like Asia and middle-east, but honestly… The methods aren’t any different.
N
wow – thank you for sharing your professional insight. Today i learned.
F
You seem knowledgeable. Question. If we just repour the concrete where it was taken out, will the building be fine again? Assuming the rebar isn’t cut and remains. Btw if you already answered above I’m sorry but I couldn’t understand the first half of the first paragraph at all and my brain just couldn’t read ahead. Looked like a word jumble to me.
S
Well… Yes and no. You can’t just pour it in. you need to prep the surface by washing, wetting and some chemistry. But essentially yes… Once the concrete has hardeneed. And you don’t even need the rebar to be OK. Rebar is fixed all the time. You do this by simply partial demolition of the concrete, cutting the rebar and welding or attaching new ones (depending on what kind of fix is easiest and most applicable). Corroded and damaged and rust jacked concrete is fixed regularly. Like… I dont want to downplay the effort, expertise and considerations that go into this stuff. But rebar concrete is like… amazing in how versatile, effective and functional it is, considered how simple and easy it truly is to work with. Concrete is basicaly magic. Its liquid rock essentially. And it is overused because it is so easy and versatile, it is non-renewable resources because we ain’t getting more rock and there is limited amount of sand which is of correct size and shape so it can be used (Like desert sand can’t be used, it is too smooth. You want big coarse and rough sand particulates). As long as you can hook up the rebard and steel structures that join to the other concrete; then you can mend the structural matrix as a whole. However here is a key thing: New young concrete (as in like… Less than 20 years if I recall right) is much easier to fix, and it is much more vulnerable to fire (it contains water which is bad if the concrete heats up, and good if you want join more concrete (Cement hardens via hydration which leads to… actually quite rather complex formation of calcium silicate hydrates that I am not that familiar with, as I generally deal with only steel that goes into or onto concrete). Older the concrete is the harder it is to get it to join with the new, but there are some truly magical additives that the concrete wizards use which make this possible. But like it isn’t unheard of that a whole load bearing wall of a concrete structure gets replaced as a whole in one go. A big structure can get fixed like this easily, if you just do it in sections.
R
This is in China. I’m sure the building owners would quickly install load-bearing styrofoam sheets. I’m kidding…sort of. Apparently the Chinese man found it easy to cut out the corner since they were originally weak reinforcing panels.
M
Beyond supporting the weight, you’d use some high capacity concrete and redo the column. Probably something the achieves design resistance in 3 or 7 days, as regular concrete would take 30 days and leaving it that long with temporary supports isn’t ideal. As the column was removed, the whole structure has shifted in some way. It may not represent immediate danger, as the rest of the structure works with the shifted load, but it obviously won’t stand to time. For example, it’s not rare for some columns to start acting under tension instead of compression due to the load shifting durng strong windstorms. After estabilization, you’d need to figure if the structure has moved too far (In which case, you’d jack the structure up before doing any construction), and how much of that movement represents extra loads on the rest of the structure, but that’s it.
T
I used to work in Commercial Construction management and yeah I saw that thinking WTF this would scare me to death. That being said I will say you all structural engineers will over engineer things with a fair amount of safety. One that comes to mind for me was we were doing a concrete pour and mid poor the engineers/ Architects figured out we did not have the required clearance under a parking garage ramp stop the pour there made a break. Now lets get to the over engineered part. Their solution to solve this issue was to remove 2 beams and throw in a few extra #3 in the slab. 2 entire concreat beams removed under a parking garage ramp and replaced with a few #3 bars. They removed more steel than those #3 added. We joke that the someone was getting ripe off building here and it sure as hell was not the concrete or the steel suppliers and not us GC. It always amused me how over engineer it was that 2 entire concrete beams can be removed and not problem. You can still go to that building and go look at the ramp from the 2nd-3rd level and just see to concrete beams have a weird stopping point and a weird break in the ram slab.
S
You’re confirming that the Code Red is a real practice in your organization???
F
I want to see the follow up video once all the rebar has been cut ✂️
M
Rebar is there to resist tension, concrete resists compression, so most of the support capacity is already gone. Buildings have to be designed with massive safety margins in case… something like this happens, so it won’t collapse immediately probably. Still unfathomably stupid of course
M
Are they really sitting there going, “hey let’s make sure the margin is big enough in case some dumbass decides to cut a chunk off?” 😂 But yeah thank go for the margins
M
There could be accidents like cars slamming into it, earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, ground settling, wear over time, and they could be built with defects. Plus you don’t want the building to sway in the wind
J
Planes and missiles have been known to hit buildings before too.
M
Yeah didn’t want to immediately go there :-) I had workers drill through a prefab prestressed concrete wall down to the rebar without warning, because these needed to put power socket there. 🤦♂️ A real life situation where I used a bit of my safety margin
Z
I’m impressed with their tenacity to put an outlet in
T
A big problem with engineered wood beams. Every one has a rotary hole saw that will get a wire/pipe past that annoying wood thing. That plank in the centre is just to hold the other bits apart anyways….
S
Tall buildings actually sway from wind (and earthquakes) by design. It allows them to dissipate some of the huge lateral forces they would otherwise have to rigidly resist.
T
you actually do want buildings to sway in the wind. if they’re too rigid, they just fall over. the next time you’re in a skyscraper, shut your eyes. you can feel the building move.
P
I will not.
K
sort of yes. It called redundancy.
E
It’s so they can sleep at night
E
Reminds me of [this real story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q56PMJbCFXQ), where an engineer later realized what he missed and couldn’t bear the weight of the dangerous implication (no pun intended).
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