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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

So you'd be comfortable to live in a high rise building for which an independent engineering report contained the following text?

The joint sealant was observed to be beyond its useful life and are in need of complete replacement. However, the waterproofing below the Pool Deck & Entrance Drive as well as all of the planter waterproofing is beyond its useful life and therefore must all be completely removed and replaced. The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.

Edit - this is text from the actual report - not sure why the downvotes.

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That statement is buried on page 7 of the report, no bold text. Yet, above it on page 6 a reminder to follow OSHA-approved window washing techniques is in bold.

Given the context and formatting, this warning seems more like a pro-forma CYA than anything else.

I think when you pay an engineering firm thousands of dollars for a report you tend to read the whole thing. What is it that doesn't jive with the NPR article? The report does indeed call out major structural damage. The report warns that without remediation the damage will spread, exponentially.

The bold is in reference to specific regulations. Everything bolded in the document is a reference to another document. So it may not be for emphasis but rather reference.

Fair. Good observation.

It's hard for me to know because I don't know what the pool deck and entrance drive supports. But I do think rushing to proclaim possible causes is not very helpful, since that information is not actionable. No harm will be done by waiting until we have higher quality information.

From pictures, the pool deck seems to have survived the collapse; it wasn't under the towers.[0]

I wouldn't expect this paragraph to have anything to do with a tower collapsing. Pools-in-the-air (over a garage) are notoriously leaky. I read this section to say "the pool might leak if the bottom lacks structural integrity."

In no way would I think "the pool deck is holding up the towers next door."

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2021/06/24/florid...

I didn't downvote you, but my guess is that people, like me, don't find that block of text that damning. The text talks about damage to the slab. It does not connect slab damage to damage that could risk the entire building.

If there is risk that a component failure leads to systematic failure, I would expect that a report would delineate that risk.

But the pool and deck aren't within/under the residential units, so I'm not sure why that text would be so alarming.

It may be equally likely the next lot underground garage construction shifted the ground near the condo and caused it's collapse.

It doesn't scream "Get Out", does it?

When I read those sentences as a layman, they don't tell me the building may collapse.

I want to know if an analytical monotone is typical for these reports. Would a report like this be expected to emphasize urgency or would the reader be assumed to know that "major structural damage" means urgent?

If I were writing a report on a piece of software for my boss and I found unsanitized inputs to an SQL database, I wouldn't highlight that any more than anything else I found as he would know that was severe.

Quite typical from the ones I've seen (I'm not a StructE). This is actually quite alarming language for an engineering report, about one step below "imminent collapse" and "immediate evacuation".

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