A week after a safety incident made national news, we’re beginning to get clarity on what led to a blocks-wide evacuation at the project at the former Pfizer Building. It appears that construction workers at the Midtown office-to-home conversion failed to install key steel reinforcement that could have caused two columns to buckle.
The two steel columns that collapsed on July 7 in the 37-story tower at 235 East 42nd Street didn’t appear to have the reinforcing plates called for in the project plans, according to engineers interviewed by Gothamist.
Engineers from GACE Consulting Engineers had called for the added steel plates along the length of the two columns to support the 15 residential floors above.
But the columns buckled, causing floors above to sag and the city to evacuate surrounding blocks for fear of a catastrophic collapse. The Department of Buildings has not determined what caused the structural failure.
GACE Principal Engineer Chris Behan blamed the incident on a failure to install the crucial reinforcement on three floors, including the 21st, where the collapse occurred.
“The reinforcement from the 19th floor to the top of the 21st floor, which would have significantly increased the columns’ strength, was never installed,” Behan said in a written statement to Gothamist. “The structure was not reinforced as GACE’s design required.”
A spokesman for the developer MetroLoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the buckling supports.
In an interview with The Real Deal on the day of the dangerous incident, MetroLoft Principal Nathan Berman said it was possible the two columns weren’t properly reinforced. If that’s the case, it’s not clear why the job wasn’t done, and why it didn’t catch the eye of building inspectors.
A spokesperson for the Department of Buildings declined to comment on whether the reinforcing steel was installed in response to GACE’s claim. The day of the failure, the department declared the building structurally sound after emergency work to shore up each floor.
MetroLoft’s office conversion, the city’s largest, involved expanding 10 stories immediately above the collapsed columns and adding four more floors to the original 33-story tower, once the headquarters for Pfizer.
Engineers who reviewed the plans obtained by Gothamist said photos of the contorted columns didn’t appear to match the drawings. The reinforcement would have made the I-shaped columns into solid steel boxes.
“It looked to me that it wasn’t there,” Chris Cerino, past president of the Structural Engineers Association of New York, told Gothamist of the reinforcing steel prescribed in the plans. “It didn’t look like the drawings did.”
Joe DiPompeo, former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, came to a similar conclusion. The drawings, he said, indicated that the reinforcement on the columns should be “making them a box as viewed from the outside.”
“In those pictures, clearly that’s not what’s there,” Mr. DiPompeo told the New York Times. “We’re seeing that the reinforcement wasn’t actually installed as described in the drawings.”
This week, the city sent building safety inspectors across five boroughs to conduct safety reviews of unidentified construction sites.
New York City investigators have also opened a preliminary criminal inquiry into the incident. The scope and target of that investigation aren’t clear.
– Dana Bartholomew
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