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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

> My point is that _if_ the engineer believed the building was at risk of catastrophic failure they would have stated as much.

It seems like maybe the report author(s) did state as much when they said “major structural damage”. I don’t know anything about architecture but, for example, when an accounting firm issues an adverse audit opinion they don’t say “this company is totally screwed!” they say “these financial statements contain material and pervasive misstatements.” It sounds boring and benign to most people but it’s the CPA equivalent of a red alert.

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>It sounds boring and benign to most people but it’s the CPA equivalent of a red alert.

Exactly. Joe Blow building manager is not a structural engineer. The comment about "major structural damage" at the end of report was probably not even read. The beginning of the document is about paint bubbles and 'the tile makes the rail too short'. That sets the context.

The article casts a building department administrator as having some dire knowledge of the building condition and simultaneously telling residents everything is fine. But a close examining of the situation leads me to believe the building department administrator had no such indication.

"An occupied building partially collapsed, killing multiple residents. But on the other hand, the report about its systemic structural issues was long and kind of a boring read"

Are you for real?

It's not about the building. It's about the story casting aspersions on someone as if they were culpable when there is no indication they are. This was done by reading the document out of context.

Put yourself in the shoes of a building administrator responsible for oversight of hundreds to thousands of properties. You get a report like this, on a relatively young building and it looks very ho-hum.

But NPR is presenting it with hindsight bias and acting as if there was something ominous in the report. There simply wasn't... and the story is just gotcha journalism.

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