Here are 9 of the biggest engineering disasters!
9.
Sampoong Department Store, Seoul, South Korea On June 29, 1995, in the space of 20 seconds,
the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea fell to the ground, grilling 502 people
and injuring 937 others.
Criminal negligence, blatant disregard for ethical engineering practices, and shoddy
construction led to the largest peacetime disaster in South Korean history.
The problems can be traced almost exclusively to the future chairman of the building, Lee
Joon.
Under his insistence, the building was changed from being an office building to a department
store halfway through its construction.
To install the escalators, several key support columns had to be eliminated.
Later, Joon had a fifth floor added to the building.
Despite serious warnings, Joon simply hired his own company to do work others refused
to do.
Not only was the building not meant to support a fifth story, but his extra level was made
with a thick, extra heavy, heated floor.
Air conditioning units that were added to the roof quadrupled the load the structure
was designed to sustain.
To make matters worse, the building was constructed with substandard concrete and had only half
the 16 steel reinforcing bars it needed.
Also, the concrete columns were thinner than necessary and were reduced even more when
fire shields were installed around the escalators.
In April 1995, extensive cracks were spotted, yet nothing was done.
These fractures grew exponentially on the day of the disaster, but because management
didn’t want to lose the day’s revenue, they refused to evacuate the building.
Top executives, however, left as a precaution.
Seven minutes before the collapse, the building began to pop and crack, and employees sounded
the alarm, but it was too late to avert disaster, and a total of 1,500 people were trapped inside.
8.
Hotel New World, Singapore
On March 15, 1986, all six stories of Hotel New World collapsed in less than 60 seconds.
The building housed a hotel, a bank and a nightclub, all of which disintegrated into
piles of rock and twisted metal, burying 50 people inside.
It was the worst disaster Singapore had experienced since World War II, and it shocked the nation.
Singapore’s newly formed Civil Defense Force launched rescue and recovery efforts immediately,
and they continued for seven days.
Engineers and other experts from around the world were called in to assist the delicate
rescue operation.
At first, they merely removed beams and other remains from the top and sides of the ruins,
but not many bodies were recovered.
On the second day, assisted by foreign experts who were in Singapore to build a mass transit
system, rescuers began to tunnel into the rubble.
Sound-detection equipment was used to help locate the 17 lucky survivors.
After intensive research, investigators discovered a terrible error in the original design of
the building.
The structural engineer had completely left out the building’s “dead load,” in other
words, the weight of the building itself, during the design process.
As a result, it wasn’t strong enough to hold itself up.
Tragically, Hotel New World was doomed from the beginning.
7.
Three High-Rise Office Buildings, Rio, Brazil On January 26, 2012, a 20-story building in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil spontaneously collapsed.
The gigantic high-rise crashed into another ten-story building as well as a third smaller
building, reducing all three structures to one huge pile of rubble.
The impact sent an enormous wave of dust through the streets of Cinelandia square, grilling
at least 17 people.
If the disaster had occurred just a few hours earlier, it would have resulted in mass casualties.
Fortunately, the district, home to many office buildings and Brazil’s prized Municipal
Theater, was pretty desolate due to the late hour of the collapse.
Authorities suggested that illegal construction work had weakened the 20-story building and
caused it to fragment, which triggered a chain reaction and brought down the two smaller
buildings.
This catastrophe has led Brazilian authorities to call for reforms for stricter building
and renovation regulations.
6.
Skyline Plaza, Virginia, USA
On March 2, 1973, tragedy struck the Skyline Plaza complex in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia.
One of the complex’s towering apartment buildings collapsed, leaving a huge, eerie
cloud of dust and debris where it once stood.
Perhaps surprisingly, construction hadn’t even completed at the time of the disaster.
The building was not due to open until August.
Although there was no flaw in the design per se, the forms supporting the concrete columns
on the 22nd floor were prematurely removed.
The cement hadn’t yet hardened completely and couldn’t bear the weight of the 24th
floor.
The failure of these columns put an increased amount of pressure on the rest of the columns
on the 23rd floor until the entire floor buckled and slammed down onto the floor below.
The building had not been engineered to withstand such a huge increased load, and the tremendous
weight proved catastrophic.
Each floor gradually succumbed and plummeted onto the story below in a devastating ripple
effect.
Fourteen construction workers lied and 34 were injured.
Michael Hill, 31, ran all the way down the stairs from the 23rd floor when he saw cracks
appear in the ceiling.
He made it to the fourth floor when he was forced to jump out of a window.
He broke both his arms but hey, he survived!
5.
Royal Plaza Hotel, Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand On August 13, 1993, at around 10:00 am, the
once splendid six-story Royal Plaza Hotel in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand came crashing
down in less than 10 seconds.
That’s 1.6 seconds per floor!
Tragically, 137 people were grilled and 227 more were injured in the collapse.
Rescuers dug through the rubble with jackhammers and crowbars, desperately searching for signs
of life.
According to rescue teams, trapped survivors had been using their cell phones to call for
help.
A pregnant woman was pulled from the mangled pile of steel and debris 2 days after the
collapse.
Unfortunately, at the time of the collapse, the hotel was being used for several meetings
and seminars, including a large teacher conference and a Thai oil company meeting with more than
a hundred attendees.
Police detained the owner of the Royal Plaza Hotel, the architect, and an engineer over
allegations that three stories had been added to the building in 1990 without proper architectural
review.
Also, a huge amount of water was being stored on the roof of the hotel ahead of an expected
water shortage.
4.
Ronan Point, London, England In East London, on May 16, 1968, a single
match triggered the collapse of an entire corner of a massive 22-story building.
Ivy Hodge, a 56-year-old cake decorator living on the 18th floor, got up early to make herself
a cup of tea.
When Miss Hodge lit her stove, the spark from the match triggered a devastating gas explosion.
The blast tore through the joints connecting the walls to the floor and threw her to the
ground.
The load-bearing walls came apart, leaving the four apartments above her without any
kind of structural support.
The four floors came down, tearing through the floors below like falling dominoes until
an entire corner of the building lay in ruins.
The building was in fact new, its construction completed just five days prior to the collapse.
When Ronan Point came tumbling down, 260 people were in residence.
Surprisingly, only four were grilled in the disaster, while 17 were injured.
Although the building was rebuilt and the joints strengthened, public confidence in
high-rise tower buildings took a huge knock.
Many high-rise blocks, including Ronan Point, were eventually pulled down to make room for
less intimidating low-rise housing.
Ivy Hodge was treated for burns, but ultimately she and her gas stove, which she took with
her to her new address, both survived.
3.
Deepwater Horizon Explosion The single largest oil spill disaster in history
was ushered in on April 20, 2010.
The Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit suffered an explosion,
causing a massive oil leak into the ocean.
The unit, also called a MODU, was owned and operated by Transocean, and was drilling for
BP in the Macondo Prospect oil field about 40 miles (60 km) southeast off the Louisiana
coast.
The explosion caused the breaths of 11 workers and serious injury of 17 others.
The Deepwater Horizon had frequent issues with maintenance that were never taken too
seriously.
Internal BP documents show that BP engineers had concerns as early as 2009 that the metal
casing that BP wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.
According to a number of rig workers, it was understood that workers could get fired for
raising safety concerns that might delay drilling.
Preliminary findings from BP's internal investigation indicated several serious warning signs in
the hours prior to the blowout.
Equipment readings indicated gas bubbling into the well, which could signal impending
trouble.
The heavy drilling mud in the pipes initially held down the gas.
A House Energy and Commerce Committee statement in June 2010 noted that in a number of cases
leading up to the explosion, BP appears to have chosen riskier procedures to save time
or money, sometimes against the advice of its staff or contractors.
If you ignore enough warnings, you’ll eventually pay the price and that is exactly what happened
to BP.
Loss of life, loss of profit, loss of reputation and the single biggest environmental catastrophe
in recent history.
That’s a pretty high price to pay for greed.
2.
Highland Towers, Selangor, Malaysia At 1:35 pm, on December 11, 1993, a landslide
with the force of 200 jumbo jets slammed into the foundations of Block One of the Highland
Towers apartment complex.
The Highland Towers complex consisted of three 12-story residential buildings built at the
base of a steep hill just outside of Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur.
The retaining walls and drainage system had been poorly designed, and maintenance was
pretty much non-existent.
The situation grew more dangerous when another development company began construction on
a ridge just above Highland Towers.
The land was stripped and exposed to erosion, and some of the drainage pipes were blocked
with branches.
Ten days of non-stop rain put an enormous amount of pressure on the pipes.
At various points on the hill, the pipes burst, and the water content of the soil rose to
dangerous levels.
Eventually, a landslip took down a large retaining wall.
A colossal one hundred thousand square meters of mud slid into Block One, carrying it forward
and eventually snapping it.
Three people were pulled out alive on the first day, but 12 days of frantic searching
failed to unearth any more survivors.
In the aftermath, 48 bodies were recovered.
Block Two and Block Three were evacuated and stand empty to this day, like grim, overgrown
tombstones.
1.
Twin Towers, New York City, USA Without a doubt, one of the most terrifying
building disasters in recent memory is the collapse World Trade Center, on September
11, 2001.
The Twin Towers were masterfully engineered using lightweight steel, a central core, and
an egg-crate design creating a redundant structure.
In other words, if one column or support were to fail, another would take its place.
What’s more, each building was made to handle 5,000 tons of lateral wind-load.
The weight of the jets didn’t come close to overcoming the strength of these perimeter
columns.
The real problem proved to be the 90,000 gallons of burning jet fuel that sent plumes of black
smoke trailing into the sky over New York City.
The fire itself didn’t melt the steel columns holding up the building; it only weakened
them.
And, though reduced to 50 percent of their previous strength due to the temperature of
the inferno, the columns were still capable of holding up the building.
The real issue came down to the uneven temperature of the fire, which distorted the steel on
one side of skyscraper.
The stress proved too much, and eventually the floors buckled and began a domino collapse,
pancaking down one on top of the other.
Each tower weighed 500,000 tons.
And it took just ten seconds for these immense buildings to collapse, hitting the ground
at a staggering 124 mph.
Despite the fact that there were no specific engineering flaws involved in the design of
the Twin Towers, engineers continue to study the buildings to learn more about redundant
design and progressive collapse; and most importantly, with the aim of formulating life-saving
safety and evacuation procedures in
the future.
Here’s what’s next!