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> 20 years of pumping concrete is enough to know if it's significantly wrong.

No, that doesn't make sense to me. Concrete buildings are expected to last longer than 20 years, though not expected to last forever. If the shortcuts they take were cutting the expected lifetime of the structure in half, 20 years of experience would not be enough time to see those failures start to happen.

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Sorry, I mean a high school educated concrete pumper with 20 years experience will rote learn what the standards are. So the workers should see it's less than standard.

For something to be really off standard, it has to be complex or using illegal immigrant workers or something that is hard to see, like a bad concrete mix being brought in.

It also needs a reason. The cost benefit has to be more than risk. The builders won't risk a $xx million building by saving on re-bar. A contractor might, but they'd have to get away with it.

It was 1979. The height of Mafia control over large building projects especially anything using cement. I would be totally unsurprised if corners were cut to reduce costs and pad the pockets of some capo who was running the union on that job.

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