Building failures

By Nam Sang-so

Most building defects are the result of human error and they are avoidable. They occur not through a lack of basic knowledge but by the non-application or misapplication of it. Knowledge is mislaid from time to time.

Construction involves every facet of endeavor: design and delineation of such information into the universal language of drawings, the preparation of materials and finally assembly of components at the site. The construction industry increases its capability by learning from its mistakes, but many of the failures could be avoided if they knew about the mistakes made by others.

When a failure occurs, there usually follows a long argument and litigation. Sometimes there is a single explanation, but mostly it is a combination of conditions, mistakes, lack of oversight, ignorance, incompetence and even dishonest performance ― and worst of all, the potential corruption that comes along the way to the site.

Contrary to the common belief that a single architect runs every field of the design activities, there are several engineers who contribute to the completion of a design. They are soil/foundations, structural, civil, mechanical and electrical engineers, a specifications writer and so on. It's teamwork.

CNN has reported that at least 24 people are dead and 124 people are still unaccounted for (as of July 5) after a residential building partially collapsed in Florida's town of Surfside. Three years before the deadly collapse of the condominium complex, a consultant found alarming evidence of major structural damage to concrete slabs and abundant cracking and crumbling of columns, beams and walls in the 13-story and 40-year-old building; and the complex's management had known about some of the problems. The collapse of an apartment building in America, one of the world's wealthiest nations, has stunned construction industry experts not only in the United States but also around the world.

The Florida news flashed my memory back to the tragic and ill-reputed collapse of the five-story Wau Apartment building in western Seoul in April 1970. I was a member of the structural investigation team looking into the cause of the accident, in which the building was squashed flat, killing 34 and injuring more than 40 residents. It was a combination of ignorance, incompetence and dishonest performance by the contractor who had colluded with the supervising authorities in the government.

We discovered the stunningly poor quality of the structure ― some columns were reinforced far less than the design requirement and there had been no quality control over the concrete operation. The compression tests made on the specimens registered less than a quarter of the structural requirements. “That's all we had…” a foreman of the contractor shouted back to us when we questioned him. He meant that the majority of the money needed in the field had leaked away before it reached the site.

As I have said, most building defects are avoidable only if the architects, engineers and construction contractors faithfully follow the terms of the contract and technical specifications, all of which have been prepared by the technical laboratories based on the tragic history of construction failures.

The writer (sangsonam@gmail.com) is retired architect/engineer.