PileOfWalthers
15720
260
10
Turns out doing this...
...will result in that?
https://www.amny.com/new-york/manhattan/evacuations-midtown-beams-buckle-skyscraper-07072026/
Jul 8, 2026 11:39 AM
PileOfWalthers
15720
260
10
Turns out doing this...
...will result in that?
https://www.amny.com/new-york/manhattan/evacuations-midtown-beams-buckle-skyscraper-07072026/
leviaton
No Dana
Only Zule
Pelican3
They failed to account for extra elevators and entrances for the commoners.
youreathing
That seems like an expensive oopsie
JackamoJones702
Well, there's your problem right there...
Nanoline
So, here's the important part about why this is such a shitshow, because some right-wing folks are like "OH SEE THATS WHY YOU CAN'T MAKE AFFORDABLE HOUSING, CHEAP AFFORDABLE HOUSING IS TO BLAME" - and, no.
Pfizer, who owns the building, was planning to build *1,600 luxury high-rises*, and only *later* said "maybe 400 will be affordable housing" via trying to reduce costs in taxes. So Pfizer wanted expensive apartments but cheaped the fuck out on construction.
NKato
The company is Metro Loft, not Pfizer: the pharma company sold their stake in that building when they moved.
TheMurderousCricket
That 219E 42nd is doing some heavy lifting and I mean it...
TheIronPenguin
Now they can add even more floors without the building getting too high!
Sebastopol140
aaaaaaaaaahh!!!! The angle of that window look weird! Run!
wanderer2575
Someone will sue because the older building didn't have a label saying "Do Not Stack More Than 10 Storys High."
PileOfWalthers
BigIrv5151
Lookin' a little rough, there.
HighSorcerer
They said "affordable" housing not "livable" housing.
CarlBassett
Well they're not meant to be luxury flats. If we make sure the tenants are of light build and relatively sedentary and if the weather’s on our side, I think we have a winner here.
CarlBassett
The Architects Sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVm-xfu_dro
Niixiie
Deconstructivism
bnm12
That wasn't done by jetfuel
sherlockhooves
The comments here are wild. Guys the idea of adding floors to an existing building isn't new, and has been done successfully for decades. That's not what caused the steel to bend and the structure to become compromised. The contractor wanted to save money and used cheap, non-union labor that had no clue how to shore up a building and get it ready for more floors. This has nothing to do with what they planned, just pure greed and ignoring regulations.
Mxlespxles
You must construct additional pylons!
OnFridaysWeWearBeskar
Adding 19 floors to a 10 floor building? Oh for god's sake.
rhalm
The structural issue happened to the other building.
OnFridaysWeWearBeskar
I can't see how adding 19 floors to a building that's 60+ years old when it was only originally designed for 10 can't end in tragedy. Adding a handful to one that's only a fraction of an increase is nothing compared to tripling it. Good old NYC grift has allowed this I'm sure.
rhalm
It doesn't matter what you see or what you say you're sure of, what matters is how accurately those in charge of its construction determined its capacity and tolerances. How it will actually go? Who knows. But definitely not anyone on Imgur.
OnFridaysWeWearBeskar
Five floors of one of the buildings is in collapse.
Evidence shows they don't know what they're doing.
theyallwenttoMexico
Assumptions were made.
TsubakiTragic
That'll buff right out.
FPAlpha
Yeah, you go hit it with a hammer to buff it out. I'll wait outside. Watching from a safe distance. While eating popcorn.
davebarton315101
Has anyone ever played Jenga?
Pentjotal
"Jet fuel can't melt steel beams." well non union worker can bent them apparently
AyatollahBahloni
"Johnson also alleged that the building’s developers chose cheaper, non-union labor to cut costs on steel installation and other parts of the project." Welp, There's a big part of the problem right there.
TravelingTableTop
The current engineers are at least in part to blame for not factoring in the latent waste, fraud, and abuse in New York construction. Many such cases.
2Soon4Baboon
https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1YmRseWQ4aTg1YmFraG1kZjRlMnAxaTk2b3NiZWI5cXAwZWJndW85eCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/AaQYP9zh24UFi/200w.webp
timGiraffeBeast
Things seen today doing structural assessment
BigSwede7403
I'm just wondering how long until it surfaces they asked AI if the modifications was possible...
rhalm
Using computers to calculate structure load tolerance has been standard for decades.
BigSwede7403
Yeah, but that is done by (at least expected to be) professionals checking and feeding materials and loads into dedicated programs, while others check local regulations and do building inspections. Not ask a glorified search program "Can i build ontop of another building?" and go with what ever result the AI halucinates up.
rhalm
Obviously. Which is why they don't do that.
BigSwede7403
You mean the same way those lawyer firms that got caught doing it wouldn't do that?
rhalm
No, I mean in the way architects and engineers go about planning and designing buildings. Not that they're perfect of course and mistakes do happen, but its silly to think some single person asked an LLM how to make the building expansions and they just went with that and no other input.
Currahee63
They've had to clear a large zone around this, because they have no idea which way it's going to come down. Will it pancake, or tip?
dieselpunk
But two 110-story buildings collapsed neatly on their own footprints after each sustaining single aircraft strikes they were designed to survive.
laserfork
Falling debris from the two towers caused structural damage and fires in WTC 7, leading to its collapse later that day.
MoopsyLD
just the 21st floor. they said its not at risk of total collapse only just partial collapse. the main issues were the 21st floor area with beams and sagging floors.
rmx256
It isn't supposed to do that.
DarkDesertHighway
They replaced the facade and all the windows down there, that definitely should have made it more structurally sound!
Knifesmith
MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF ADDITIONAL WEIGHT CAN'T BEND STEEL BEAMS!!!
Wake up Sheeple!!! (heavy /s for the sarcasm impaired)
OdinYggd
Throw some jet fuel on it to heat them up and bend them back. Blacksmiths aren't extinct they know how to fix it.
draslin
Yeah. Who could have predicted that a building that hadn't been designed to be three times its original height might buckle under all that additional weight.
barbarian818
The plan was to carry the vast majority of the additional weight on steel beams run through the building and down into their own piers. And very little of that steel structure is actually complete. Someone drastically underestimated the amount of load that would be present during construction.
GoddessPurpleFrost
Still $2,300 a month in rent. Also, you need to take out life insurance and make us, the corporation, your beneficiary in order to rent.
modus0
And sign an agreement that your family can't sue, in the incredibly unlikely event that something happens to the building resulting in your death.
Nostradamuswaswrong
Also agree that you can't join a class action, only binding arbitration by a judge of our choosing.
hogeyegrex
It’s actually the taller building that has the collapsing beams.
CallMeCourierSix
This is not a repairable problem either. The beams have been damaged, and they can't know how many, or how close to failure each one is at this point. This is likely going to be a full demolition, which might be what they planned for all along. Now they HAVE to destroy it, and WOOPS! ALL OFFICE SPACE!
NKato
And yet there are people who are trying to save this building instead of taking the fucking weight off.
If Mamdani doesn't put the kibosh on this before it gets people killed, it's going to become a massive political liability.
fartyandbloated
FWIW, the building that has the problem is the one that’s adding four floors. That’s even more concerning for the other one IMHO.
PileOfWalthers
Baffling!
OldSchoolNewRules
People who can actually do load calculations.
presswc
To be fair, many older buildings were constructed with materials that could far exceed the actual load on the building as constructed. In the days of less sophisticated structural engineering and testing, buildings were designed and built with significant room for error.
I suspect there were rigorous structural studies done on the feasibility of adding stories and the structural support needed. This could be the result of inconsistency in the original building materials.
Felberin
I got impression the 4 stores on the taller building was actually the issue here, the 19 stores on other side was fine..? So I guess someone fucked up their math or inspections of the support pillars.
Dawgsarethebestpeople
You can clearly see the yellow areas need better support so they turn green!
rhalm
And then the supports turn red or yellow from the load, so you have to build supports for those supports, and then the floor under them turns yellow, so you have to...
TakuanSoho
The bees are happy
arrbos
They gotta plant some trees and bridge over a support beam.
DrOsmium
Greetings fellow viking
Elonth
SKOL! I miss playing Valheim with the boys. At one point our server/world had 12-13 people playing...and when that many people are in a world at once boy does the game ramp up the damage numbers to where getting hit is instant death.
Sadly right when the fire zone got added we failed 3-5 invasion attempts to make a beach head so we could start base building there. With that many players you get hit one by anything you instantly die. And units don't really despawn game died for us there....
Elonth
Even if you attempt to go with 6 or less people the enemies don't really despawn. So all that territory is just filled with a crap ton of mobs to fight our big numbers with out the player count damage scaling. I think we succesfully managed to destroy at most 2 spawners in the area before the game died...We had a grand hall built into a roofed dock shipyard that me and 1 other player spent hours building and harvesting materials form...shame it just sits there...
MelfsAcidArrow
Roofs are always my downfall
firethelurker
Gotta get some stone pillars under the trusses as support
MantisTobagganMD
Iron beams. And, of course, mods to allow for free building, because fuck gathering that much iron.
sevenfingerman
…did they not hire an engineer?
philmoregraves
Ai baby
NeverDownvoteMelBrooks
evilspock
Probably. But engineers are only as good as the information they have. There are a million places things can go wrong between engineering and reality, and in actual construction sometimes people take shortcuts. If a given section that was supposed to be riveted just wasn't - and is now under fireproofing material - you might never find out until it fails.
dieselpunk
They probably fired him because he told them their idea was outside their budget.
GoddessPurpleFrost
Yea yea, we have one structural support beam we don't need TWO.
afterdarkart
The contract was given to a non-union company which means it was probably the poorest bid possible.
MrStealYourGiF
Manager asks LLM how many million pounds the bottom will support, LLM goes looking at scrapes for mentions of "million pounds" finds a lot in UK infrastructure projects, decides 55 Million pounds (Sterling!!) is the most commonly mentioned number. Gives answer of 55 Million pounds. Manager goes, awesome, the structural survey from 1998 said it was only good for 20 million and dropping due to corrosion and age, guess we can throw that out now....
rhalm
That's definitely not what would happen.
IWantedOneOfThoseLongUsernamesTooSoIGotOne
It is sad how plausible this is.
Steepone
There's a big gap between hiring an engineer and listening to what the engineer tells them
SmellingMistake
Just because someone is an engineer doesn't mean they are a good engineer.
heckruler
The crux of why engineering is expensive. The cost is high, but not as high as hiring a bad engineer.
chumpacabra
Worse. They hired an architect.
cosonfused
hello RCE.
sevenfingerman
May god have mercy on their souls.
jr42046
thricebakedxyz
Hired Vandelay Industries?
Fifofu
ChatGPT add 19 more floors. Make them larger. Minimal costs. Fast.
rhalm
This didn't happen to the building that's having 19 floors added.
Walexmith
Yet
purpledd
Did they forget to add "Make no mistakes"
presswc
“Yes. You can absolutely add 19 more floors and make them larger. Would you like me to send you a diagram of what this would look like?”
youreathing
"I got you, and I fully support you. Let me just do that real quick."