It almost looks like there are two guys there. One outside on the deck is in and just as he's about to go inside another person appears in the opening then the whole thing collapses on top of them. Hopefully it's just the quality of the video and not two deaths.

More details, injured and dead -

https://www.nola.com/news/article_ca2f263a-ed77-11e9-8cfa-5702e27e6a87.html

I’ve had a few jobs that had some good point load trusses that were designed and engineered from the truss co. They would end up carrying biiiig Hvac units, and we had the project engineers draw up a spec to load 7 units of 19/32 on it. It involved the framing underneath to be complete including sheer walls and anchors. Then the carrier trusses had brace panels between them with some extra hardware. And we built the unit roof cribbings to the spec drawings. After one special inspection, it worked great. While the crane was there to ohl a few pieces of red iron the reachlift couldn’t get to, we had the unit cribs built and ply on the ground waiting. The same load points ended up where we stabbed some of the piggy back trusses until we had time to roll them.

I’ve seen a few trusses crash. One was on a Walgreens/ bank/ strip mall. Rookie contractor was batting outside of his league. The cost of reframing the building and rebuilding the trusses he broke in the crash bankrupted him. The job took a year over projected open. Luckily no one was hurt.

Forms stripped to soon or bad concrete.

Lot of damage besides just the collapsed area.

All you have to do is heat them to around 800F and most of their strength is gone.
A dull red color does it well.

Knock it down.

[youtube]zu828SXiNuMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu828SXiNuM[/youtube]

By accident, we wound up by where it collapsed. Attached File

Attached File

Listen to this one.

The city of New Orleans talked about 'good likelihood of further collapse of building.' The city's 5 pm update included concern over a possible tropical depression or storm that could increase winds and rain in the city over the weekend. There is also a problem figuring out how to disassemble the crane because the original plan to stabilize it with other cranes is not feasible.

Sagging the day before (0:56)





A video posted late Tuesday on Facebook by a local contractor purports to show the concrete slab above an upper level of the since-collapsed Hard Rock Hotel sagging to the point of bowing the temporary posts supporting it.

Randy Gaspard, a local concrete contractor, said the video was shot by a worker on Thursday, two days before the structure pancaked from the top Saturday morning, killing at least two.

Gaspard said he received the video from the worker who took it. He declined to identify the man or his employer on the hotel job. That worker -- who narrated in Spanish -- had some choice words for the engineering work as he panned across the open floor to show signs of failure.

“Look, Papo, 'the best engineering!' Look at these large stretches (between supports) and shit beams! (unintelligible) They’re already to the point of breaking," he says in the video.

"Look at this, Papo,"he adds, pointing the camera at a bent support jack. "Look at how it’s bent already! They couldn’t remove it because it's too bent and it has too much pressure. The huge spaces without beams – look! What a very shit structure these architects and engineers are building! Little gringos! … This is seriously bad, Papa!”

Gaspard said he didn’t know what floor the worker was on when he shot the video.

“What it shows is that the concrete deck has so much deflection that they can’t remove the shore posts,” Gaspard said. “They have so much load on them, it’s bending them.”

Gaspard said he’s been told workers had been removing the temporary posts, and “when they got to less and less of them, got more and more load on ‘em,” they tried to tell the contractor to stop but were told to keep going.

The video also shows water ponding in areas. Gaspard said the pooling was several inches deep and called it another sign of an as-yet undetermined engineering flaw that may have led to the collapse of the building at the corner of Canal and Rampart streets.

The worker in the video isn’t the only one who seemed unnerved by the widely spaced, thin beams. Angel Oyuela, who said he was working on the 14th floor on Saturday at the time of the collapse and escaped using a set of emergency stairs, told a reporter Tuesday that one thing that struck him while on the construction site was that it seemed to him “the beams were too thin and too separated.”

“The metal beams seemed to be too thin and too separated,” Oyuela said a second time, for emphasis.

Brian Trascher, a spokesman for the contractor on the $85 million hotel project, Metairie-based Citadel Builders, questioned the provenance of the video and cautioned against drawing any conclusions from it.

“I think there’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on, a lot of people trying to flex their engineering muscles because this happened,” he said.

Trascher declined to comment on speculation, by the worker who shot the video and others, over the distance between the support beams and whether they were too far apart to handle the load.

He said the company has brought in top experts, including those who worked on the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11, and in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

“At this time it's just not productive to comment on speculation, especially not social media,” Trascher said. “That's why we brought in these experts. These people don't live on Facebook for a living, they do this kind of a thing for a living, and I think we're going to follow their advice.”

More

City hoping for a controlled takedown of Hard Rock collapse site

Holy shit, if I was the mexican whistleblower I wouldn't have stepped foot in that building after seeing the screwjacks bent like that.

And those unsupported spans on the conform decking?

Have you never heard of shored composite construction before?

ETA- It should have looked something like this:



I just see random posts with no beam up top in the video.

Thanks. Doesn't looked to me like reinforced concrete build and I wondered what's the technology . Strangely very few, and thin ,columns.

The plans have apparently been made public by the city. Was in the room with some structural engineers today that looked at the plans and they were shocked to see such long, unsupported spans of concrete deck, as well as the sizes of beams and columns.

Watch the video, there are some looong deck spans in there without bracing or beams, and the screwjack that is there is bent about 6" out of plane.

I'm not saying impossibly long for final conditions if there's enough steel structure, just I'd expect to see more temp shoring at that point at a minimum and those girders look shallow for the spans they are supporting.

If the engineering checks, it checks.  But at first glance it just does *not* look right.

The building did the needful.

From what I have experienced the submitted drawings seldom matched the current job site drawings. Even though changes were supposed to be submitted they seldom were until requested.
The latest ones from the job site is what I would want to see and any field approved changes by letter/email.

That’s the point of shored composite construction.  Shear studs welded to the tops of the beams provide a transformed section after the concrete is cured that allows you to use lighter beams and girders on larger spans.  The deck HAS to be supported until the concrete cures though.  It’s hard to tell in the ipotato video but it looks like they didn’t have enough temporary shoring under it.  The post that buckled is an obvious case of overload, so either someone set a large bundle of materials right above that post, or they didn’t have enough posts.  I am betting they didn’t have enough posts, and as noted, I didn’t see any shoring beams. Again, it’s hard to make out in the video.

The fact that they made it to the 11th floor before they had issues though makes me think someone got sloppy with the shoring. One floor/bay collapsed and down came the rest.

This.

I didn't see it anywhere who's the contractor ?

I have worked on the Hard Rock Tampa and Hollywood the new guitar shaped one. Glad I am not on that one.

That link gave my phone add aids

I found the plans Here.  There is a set of structural drawings, but the resolution is really crappy.  I would love to see a clean copy.

The beam spacing is wide...much too wide to not be a shored job.

Also there are interesting notes about ongoing federal investigations into inspectors taking bribes, so there’s that angle too.

I hope the GC and hard rock are sued to oblivion anyone who's been around construction
for an extended period of years knows better than this,  shoddy piece of shit that they built with ghetto goblins and illegals running the show

Somebody bigged up fuck time. If temporary supports or shoring is the cause, that sucks. There was a bridge collapse during building somewhere in the Northeast years ago where the crew did mostly everything right except they made half asses pads for the temp supports to rest on. The pads fail, or crumbled, causing the supports to give way and everything came down. I believe people were killed in the collapse also.

Temporary supports need to be engineered as well as the main structure. They're not just some shit you throw together.

Here in NYC we have site safety managers I wonder if they have to have them in New Orleans I'm sure they do , if I was him
I'd be crossing the Rio Grande right after that happened ,he's going to go down hard for this calamity not only him but the GC and Hard rock .

Some people probably died...so permanent consequences.

This is New Orleans - the question is how many inspectors taking bribes.  

I’ve spent the last hour looking through the structural drawings, and I have a baaaaad feeling about this building.

There are some things that just don’t make sense to me.

This is a partial framing plan of floors 9-13.

There is a 21’ span for a 3” floor deck, that would work with intermediate shoring, but would have very little capacity in the final configuration. The W12x26 seems too small for the span and floor area it’s carrying, and who hangs a W12 girder on a 6” tube?!  Nope, nope, nope.

Attached File


@scw

We're saying the same thing- I'm well aware of how composite slab systems work.  It's obvious there's a lack of shoring (you can see the decking sagging), but even with proper shoring it looks too open and too light of construction.  Is it? Dunno, I didn't design it, check it, or seal it.

If the design checks, it checks - but looking at that gets my spidey tingles going.

I'm hoping it's just shitty means and methods, and not shitty design meets shitty execution for an absolute shitnado.

I was leaning towards mistakes in implementation, but after looking at the drawings for a bit, I’m not so sure.

I bet there are engineers and architects that have not slept since Saturday if the CDs look like the permit set (the clip from above).

HOLY SMOKES!!!!!!  I can't believe they hung a 12"b wide flange off of a 6" tube.

Thanks for the @, I hadn't followed this thread.  This is an amazing development.  Have you run any quick and dirty numbers on that design?  I'm just wondering of there's a few engineers headed to prison for this one.

Exactly - everything just looks small for the spans they're trying to pull off.  I haven't seen the plans other than your screenshot there, it just looks like someone was running the ragged edge of engineering or the ragged edge of their budget.

I'm curious how much *extra weight* is on top of that decking.  You say the plans call for 3".  I can see the decking sagging that much, so for shoring spans we need to be looking at the 5" or 6" table.

"Hmm, I wonder why our concrete isn't going far enough.  Supplier must be shorting the loads!"

No...the deck is a 3” deep deck.  Or it was supposed to be, anyway.  I couldn’t find a section that gave the concrete depth, but probably 6” or so.  That’s not sufficient for a 21’ span, even with composite action.

I’m going to when I get to my office.  I’ve never used a 12” beam on a 37’ span, either.  The deflection will be huge, even with composite contributions.

I've scarily experienced that first hand.

C-Channel that fell; no one wanted to put it up after the fact so it sat outside the rest of the job.

Whoa.

If my civil/structural guy wasn't so busy I'd send this to him for a good analysis.

How did the city engineer's sign off on the drawings on this site it's clear as day that there are not enough columns and supports
looks to me that the city engineers didn't even look at the drawings and load bearings for each floor , looks like a few people should be going to jail .

Gravity

Gotcha, thought you were saying it was t=3.0" for a total slab thickness of 6.0", not that it was 3" decking.

I assumed 3" decking from the video and 6-8" total, hence I expected to see temporary bracing about every 10-12' - not a single post in the the middle of a 30' span.

Don't think city engineers check the drawings. Not their jobs.
It all falls to the project engineers.

Here you have plans drawn and sealed by architect or engineer.
Building dept looks for stamp that's all.

I ran a quick and dirty beam check in Enercalc as a composite beam -
I used a 37' beam, 18' tributary length, 3" slab, 40psf live load.

It's utilized at 170%!!!

Unpossible

NE is all union.  We have learned in this thread that bad shit never happens when The Union is on site

As for the engineering chat above:



Somebody done fucked up A-Aron.

How much just under the slab load, assuming normal weight concrete?

How much deflection with the transformed moment of inertia?