Midtown Manhattan blocks evacuated after beams buckling at construction site | Hacker News Reader

Midtown Manhattan blocks evacuated after beams buckling at construction site

abcnews.com

46 pointsdanso32 comments

They're adding a hunch of floors to an existing building - it was the old Pfizer headquarters and they want to turn it into apartments. Someone either didn't do the proper engineering study, or the original specs weren't accurate.

Figuring out who to blame will probably take years in court.

More often than a faulty initial design, it's because of a something not being followed, e.g. the design called for one type of material or process and another was used during construction, either on accident or on purpose but without correctly doing the math to verify that it will work.

This makes a case for engineering margins, maybe even running the numbers assuming a worse grade of steel or bolts than specified. Also worth remembering this building wasn't special. If this was a design or construction flaw that surfaced with added load, a lot of other buildings from that era probably have a similar issue.

Could also be incorrect materials used. than specified? Fake parts? or construction , used that not obvious

This is a little pedantic but the pictures seem to show failing support columns not beams.

Beams are horizontal and columns are vertical.

I'm not an expert but those look like pretty wimpy columns? Kind of surprising, when I worked in a tower it had exposed concrete columns that were very thick in comparison

I think the first picture is not showing structural columns: they're more a symptom (buckling as the building is moving) as opposed to the cause.

As the sibling says, that first picture shows essentially interior wall framing. They shouldn't really be seeing any load!

They are buckling because the floors and ceilings are bending!

Scroll down and there is a picture of a much thicker support pillar, though still seems thin? Maybe just the context in frame doesn't do it justice.

Having seen the photos, I simply can't imagine how can they recover from that.

NYT updates (non-paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/07/nyregion/pfizer-buil...

There was the Citibank headquarters

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/05/29/the-fifty-nine...

Does anyone here have any knowledge of how something like this gets resolved?

Given all the bad press around things like the millennium tower, I think once you have an issue like this, the building is done. No one will want to live there. And given structural problems with load bearing beams, I would expect the building has to be demolished. But maybe they can demolish it top down partially and rebuild up from the compromised area if the city and engineers deem that safe.

Knocking down a building like this will be a huge pain, extremely expensive, and very dangerous. I think you can assume the developers will try desperately to retrofit the building before demo. There’s good precedence for this even in New York City. Look into the Citicorp case study.

Tie every helicopter you can find to the roof, gas the bent bit off, haul it away and drop it somewhere?

They'll likely shore it up with hydraulic props - probably going through the floor and ceiling to floor slabs above and below - to stabilise it, and then start demolishing the building bit by bit.

When you run the mental model of picking up a building with a bunch of surplus Hueys, do they not all collide together once they start bearing weight?

Not if you make the strings different lengths.

In that case the helicopters lower in the pecking order will chop off the strings for the higher ones. I thing seagulls is a better idea, if it worked for a giant peach it should work for a building. Plenty of those around and they'll work for peanuts.

Balloons should do it.

“spreader bar”

But not one made out of the same stuff as those beams, they're like chocolate.

Most likely the building gets stabilized and then anyone involved gets embroiled in lawsuits and it stays standing half finished for years. One Seaport is a famous recent example of an under construction skyscraper getting halted for structural issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane

They have something like that in San Francisco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/301_Mission_Street) but they key to finishing it is to not tell anyone it's crooked until after you've sold all of the units.

As flatpandas[0] points out, this might in fact be the best possible practical outcome.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48820971

Yes, sometimes gravity resolves the problem for you.

You mean they are buckling even without the benefit of being struck with an aircraft or thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel?

I wonder if Metroloft cut corners on structural engineering practices given that they also exploit non-union workers.

The USA is mostly empty space. Trying to force upwards in such an already dense area just doesn't make sense. We are not constrained the way singapore is.

Spreading out requires more non-foot travel to get places. Density means things can be closer.

Seeing how elevators are akin to vertical subways I think that problem goes both ways.

Definitely had to factor in elevator time for my commute when I worked on the 38th floor.

It's illegal to build dense cities like Manhattan in most of the United States. And while most people want to live in a Manhattan'esque area, plenty (like me) do.

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