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In 2019, the Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans partially collapsed, killing three and injuring dozens more. Norma Jean Mattei said the event happened practically in her backyard.
Then, she said, the local media got to know her well, and for good reason. Mattei served as President of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2017. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of New Orleans.
In both the collapse of the Hard Rock and the case of the failed East 42nd Street columns in Manhattan, disturbing video from inside the jobsites showed the start of structural concerns. The city of New York office to apartment conversion project was evacuated without injuries or deaths.
Here, Mattei talks with Construction Dive about assessing a structure’s hazards, the nature of the work that contributes to column failure in New York, and where construction professionals should turn with concerns.
Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Immersion in CONSTRUCTION: Fortunately there were no injuries or fatalities in this case. Beyond that, what are the broader implications of this structural failure?
NORMA JEAN MATTEI: We’re going to start hearing more about that, unfortunately, because we have a housing shortage.
Office buildings may be considered more often by their owners as potential reuse. When you take an old building and renovate it for another purpose, especially if you add to it or alter it significantly, there is always a risk associated with it.
So, do you think the type of project may have contributed to the failure?
More than likely. In this case, you have an older building. Thank goodness it doesn’t seem related to his foundation at all. They probably brought in a good team and looked at the foundation of the structure and looked at the ability of the structure in its state to be renovated for this new use.
Norma Jean Mattei
Authorization granted by ASCE
And the problem with a structure that is older is that it has aged. It has been degraded. It may not have been maintained. Even if it has, with skyscrapers, you can’t see the skeleton, you can’t see the framing that actually holds the building. And now you’re going to take it and keep something different.
By taking things apart, potential problems can appear due to design errors or construction errors that didn’t really come into play during the life of the original building, per se, until these changes.
How will this affect other builders or developers working on similar projects in New York City?
Let’s look at Surfside as an example.
Miami-Dade County saw that they had all these older high-rise condos, all of the same vintage, that were 40 years old. Some of them had had problems with poor construction or poor maintenance, so they had implemented legislation where as soon as a condominium reached 40 years old, they had to have a structural assessment by a licensed engineer.
If Manhattan is going to see more and more conversions, if they start to see something that’s systemic, they’re going to want to look at how to mitigate that risk. Allowing is about supervision. You must enforce the regulations. Because yes, if people know you have regulations, but you don’t enforce them, well, why do you have them?
The video from inside was reminiscent of the 2019 Hard Rock collapse in New Orleans. Do you think there are similarities between them?
It was a catastrophic failure.
It was a cascading series of failures that brought the building down. There was a video of a worker saying in Spanish to someone, “Look at this.”
And so you think if you have a subcontractor that has an employee, wouldn’t you want that employee to tell the foreman, and then the foreman would tell the superintendent because they could have prevented that because there was evidence that there were problems?
But if your workforce doesn’t speak English and maybe it’s illegal, will they feel able to explain this problem to someone further down the chain? And I think that did play a role in the failure of Hard Rock.
It sure looks like New York’s failure was very localized. They caught it before it became catastrophic. It could have been a local failure, and that was as far as it went.
With failed columns and sunken floors, is it realistic for the project to be fixed and continue to rise? Or will you need to download a part of it?
It depends: what is the problem? It is an older building, it may not have been well maintained, it may have suffered from corrosion or it may be a localized failure of the construction. But if it’s a design problem that’s systemic, then it’s a bigger problem.
You can mitigate anything. Once you figure out what that problem is, they can decide if it’s a localized construction or maintenance error, or even a very localized design flaw. If it’s part of the framing system, you can easily repair it. If maintenance issues have caused problems everywhere, you can.
You just have to be careful, and that means taking the time to look at the underlying causes. If it’s a build bug you didn’t know about, well, well, you might have others.
