I had no clue, ignorance successfully fought, thank you!
Imagine being one of the people looking at that roof picture and thinking, “There’s my car…”
And I was just pondering how one would get the gross weight of a vehicle from the internet, since the wight of the passengers and cargo can obviously vary greatly… I’m guessing those numbers are the maximum gross weight. In other words how much an F150 would weight if it were carrying it’s maximum allowed payload. Which isn’t really reflective of what one would weight if being driven around as if it were a big sedan.
The loading of a parking garage has increased dramatically in the last 30 years regardless of the weight of cars. Those super heavy 1950’s vehicles were also much larger. They took up substantial square footage, and you could get far fewer of them on a single floor. Our largest SUVs take up the same space as the average sedan did back then. The doors also swung wider, and parking spots had to be sized to allow for that.
I don’t know a single garage that hasn’t been “re-lined” to allow for much closer parking of more vehicles. There is always a section lined so tightly it is signed “Compact cars only.”
It would be nice to believe that an engineer was consulted before these re-linings were done, but I doubt it. If garages reach a tipping point and begin to collapse, it won’t be because of car batteries. It’s just one more dying gasp from the petroleum industry. Their PR teams are working full time trying to make electric cars feel scary. Once you know to look for it, you’ll see it everywhere.
Actually, from what I understand those really big 1950s/60s cars weren’t really any heaver than modern cars, because they lacked all the safety features modern cars have. Which is of course even worse the loading of garages today.
This building was in bad shape and probably shouldn’t have been operating as a parking structure.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/parking-garage-collapse-new-york-lower-manhattan/index.html
The building has six open property violations – three of which are classified as hazardous, according to Department of Buildings records. The three open hazardous violations date back to 2003, 2009, and 2013.
Two of these “hazardous” violations seem to include structural issues:
The two earliest hazardous violations describe “defective concrete with exposed rear cracks,” and “broken & defective fire stairs,” a “loose piece of concrete in danger of falling @ various locations” and a “defective exit,” in addition to other issues, according to the online violation summaries.
Up until about 20 years ago, you could not have a pickup truck in NYC unless it had commercial plates and a business name and address painted on it. They are still very rare in NYC, just too hard to park and maneuver. You do see plenty of large SUV’s though.
News report -
Preliminary FDNY reports said Wednesday that the deadly collapse of a Financial District parking garage was likely caused by the building’s age and the number of cars on its top deck
As we have all surmised here knowing the age of that building and the pictures of the cars packed onto that roof. I do have a civil engineering degree, but that wasn’t required for this armchair quarterback.
I’m pretty sure they were just trying to pack in as many cars as they could, and the way to do that is to put cars if similar shapes together. I do that with books on my bookcases. (And can fit in an extra shelf by putting all the short books together.)
I just heard from my son. He went in to work in person Wednesday and asked people in his building but nobody felt anything. They’re 3 blocks / .2 miles away so apparently the impact wasn’t too strong. Or maybe his building (just across from the Federal Reserve) is well reinforced?
He walked by the end of the block with the collapsed building but with the street closed off and heavy equipment and police vehicles nothing was visible.
And @JKellyMap yes there are more people living in that area now, compared to 20 years ago when it was a ghost town after office hours. My “not many people living in that area” comparison comes from having lived / visiting in the more densely residential areas of Manhattan (Upper West Side, Midtown East, Hell’s Kitchen)
For history buffs, the Ann St. building is .3 mile south of what used to be one of the worst slums in 1800s Manhattan, the Five Points.
It wasn’t a building collapse. It was a part of a building partly falling down partway to the ground. And a small one to boot.
It would totally suck to be on or under the collapsed portion. Or to have a hunk of it tumble into the street where you were standing. But unlike, say, the WTC, the destruction radius of even a complete 3-story building collapse is barely larger than the building. And amongst all the other commotion in a city is invisible & inaudible a couple blocks away.
I’m very glad your son wasn’t hurt. But it’s not surprising his workplace was unaffeced.
We went to an event in Manhattan last night, 15 minutes walk from the Financial District, and thought we would walk by and take a look. We hadn’t seen the building where our son works (he graduated from college just last year) and found out that it’s not one of the smaller 100+ year old buildings common in that area. It’s huge (60 floors) and strong looking (described as “big, broad-shouldered” on its wikipedia page 28 Liberty Street - Wikipedia) so it’s not surprising that nobody in it felt anything.
We walked by the end of Ann Street, which is quite narrow, and it looks like most of the building has been demolished already, at least the parts of it that we could see from the street, which was closed off and there were still fire trucks and police; the block behind it was closed off as well, and we could hear heavy equipment moving.
Today we spoke with an in-law who used to work in the area and has a friend who owns a business on that block; he’d heard that the person killed was the garage manager, who had worked there for many years.
That’s what I read in an online article, as well.
I wonder if we should have a betting pool on which aging or overstressed bit of US infrastructure will fail next.
Train crash(es), bunch of airport near-misses, building collapse, a few bridge failures – it’s a tossup what will come undone next.
I’ll put a few bucks on the Millennium Tower, how about you? (kidding – I hope)
78 down, only 7,800 more to go …
A post was split to a new topic: Over 100 cars trapped in hospital parking garage in Florida (9-SEP-2023)