We're back with Engineering Disasters - this time, we're going to South Korea in 1995 for one of the most horrible disasters on record. The Sampoong Department Store was never meant to be a store - it was built as an apartment building and converted into a store. Developer Lee Joon ignored all the warning signs and made bad decisions after bad decisions - resulting in a collapse that killed over 500 people. It's a classic 'Swiss Cheese' model - little things that add up to a huge disaster. Pics via the CC and AI
We're back with Engineering Disasters - this time, we're going to South Korea in 1995 for one of the most horrible disasters on record. The Sampoong Department Store was never meant to be a store - it was built as an apartment building and converted into a store. Developer Lee Joon ignored all the warning signs and made bad decisions after bad decisions - resulting in a collapse that killed over 500 people.
It's a classic 'Swiss Cheese' model - little things that add up to a huge disaster.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
[Music] in a matter of the people of State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 and so my fellow
Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your
[Music] country do you remember at work when
Alex and I used to try to figure out how to open battles of wine if we didn't have a wine opener and we would like do this thing where you would like put it in a shoe and try to bang the shoe
against the thing one time like came back to the office we would always like find bottles of wine around the office and I would came back and there was like
just quk everywhere because he had like scraped it out with scissors trying so
desperately to open it I've been in that position i' done I definitely I definitely done like a screw with like a
hammer situation before oh okay that makes sense with like the back of the hammer and like a yeah yeah you just
like SC it locks and then you pull up um people have no context on what we're
talking about um calary welcome welcome to team to fail we are joining you on a sunny Wednesday
afternoon or wherever you are uh I'm far as joyed here by Taylor we are having some drinks I'm drinking out of a child
sippy cup that I acquired from an adult establishment it is not a child C cup
it's not a strip club either I don't know why I said it that way it's just a restaurant that gives you little pink
cups that's so funny my sippy cup from a strip club
there's a lot going on also you'll notice that I'm hitting a bait pen because it makes me look young and
cool I was thinking how cool you look oh my gosh okay let me tell you this story speaking of cool people I was at the
airport the other day and because we went to North Carolina and we're at the airport in Las Vegas and there was this
couple who was so good-looking it was like good-looking man good-looking woman and they were wearing well they had no
no luggage no purses no bags they just had the nicest sweatsuits I've ever seen
with these like big cargo Pockets but they were like black and like thick sweatsuits and they were so nice and
then they were walking and the girl was holding two iPhones he was holding one
and then she like went into her pocket and she dropped a vape pen and they like she picked it up and put it back in pocket so she had two phones and a vape
pen then she went into another pocket and pulled out the biggest W of cash I've ever seen in my life it was just
like counting cash I was like who are you guys what is going on you're so cool what is this you don't need anything on
the plane except all your cash and your vapen can you make that on a plane why do you look so cool what's happening I
felt very not cool because they were so cool I think you were I think you might
have come across me and Rachel no [ __ ] they were cooler than that they
were cooler than you even cooler than you you can believe it but look at this look how cute this is look how cute it
looks it is cute okay so what happened Taylor I'll tell you this right so eight months ago whatever it was I went to
Ireland and I was with Jeff Dunn and dun Vapes and so we went to some bar in
Dublin and we were walking around they had a vending machine and the vending machine had elf bars like little vape
pen elf bars in there and D was like oh my God they have Elf bars and so he went to this vending machine pait it like
whatever it was and it spit out an Al bar I don't know it's this it's this it's
like this it's there the rectangle is one yeah the little rectangle bait pen things
and some whatever like we go to the wedding and then he's going off with his wife somewhere I'm like I'm GNA go peel
off and do my own thing somehow I ended up with the elfar and I went to Dublin I
was there for a couple of days and I noticed that I started like when I would spit in the sink it would be pink and I was like oh my God my [ __ ] mouth is
bleeding I remember you talking about that right yeah and and it freaked me
out and I was like it has to be the bait then and so I stopped but whatever for whatever reason I packed the damn thing
somehow it ended up underneath my bed at home and like three weeks ago Rachel's
like moving the bed and trying to clean it and she finds a vape pen and the
thing I started hitting it again I was like oh yeah I forgot this is kind of fun and then it ran out and then two days ago I went out and bought this my
my first baap pen I bought on my own this one right here are you are your gums bleeding again
no my gums I just started doing it so give me like a week and then we'll find
out if it's going to start bleading um but so what's in it I don't know but I
don't think it's good for me no probably not like nothing you can
inhale this much this easily can be good for you but it makes you look young and
it makes you look cool I mean smoking makes you look so cool so like yeah no 100% you look cooler when you're smoking
everyone yes everyone kids pick up a cigarette dude if I saw a kid smoking
I'd be like that look [ __ ] cool that kid [ __ ] out I'd be worried it's bad but I would be like [ __ ] it's like
somebody get this kid a [ __ ] leather jacket and Harley-Davidson what are we
doing so we are on to the fars side of our story time and I have a whole fun
little thing I'm going to talk about that I kind of touched on the last episode so I'm exciting wait should you
give me hint you think I guess it oh um do you have like a signature drink do
you have anything s you have a sign drink so the drink that I'm going to be uh drinking is something called
Su sua sua
sua um it is a Korean holiday drink that is non alcoholic and it is basically
kind of like a like a punch but it's like cinnamon and it's sweet and it looks like very fun and
sugary yeah it's not going to give you any clues but I thought it's a holiday
season a lot of people are going to be in department stores going to be in like malls things of that nature and so that's I'm kind of like being seasonal
and touching on that and I can tell you that this event took place in South Korea that's all you know all right so
I'm on engineering disasters and is this number two this is like number
four okay we need to talk about that exactly what constitut say the first four Bal okay Kansas City oh right and
roller coasters yes okay yes so I did notice like I
mentioned yesterday that after the roller coaster episode we had had like
the most downloads on that episode in like a month and then the
Napoleon one did like a tiny amount more downloads than that one did and I was
like oh so like folks are pretty into this stuff I went further back and
realized the last Spike we had after Napoleon was Kansas City the Kansas City Hiatt collapse so so I'm starting to
Guess that folks are really into like engineering disasters which is really fun because I actually love the topic
and like I love True Crime and like all that but like and but most of it is like
psychological right it's like it's like getting into the heads of like you know when you think about like kidnapping and
raping like another person and killing them like what like you know how do you get to that point in your life right
that's kind of the fascinating part of true CRI for me with engineering it's a little bit scarier in some ways CU it's
like it's like somebody did a thing or didn't do a thing and then 10 15 20 20
30 years later you can be going about your happy life doing whatever it is you do and then holy [ __ ] the floor crumbles
underneath you and you [ __ ] died it's like you know what scarier it's scarier and you know what once in a while in New
York City like a a manhole explodes right and I was like Jesus [ __ ]
Christ I walked over so many manholes and like someday they're gonna [ __ ] explode yeah but like that [ __ ] happens
all the time so there's there another situation I read about where like this these two guys got into a fight one of
them like kicked the other guy the guy fell down and then somehow some way a [ __ ] sinkhole develops Underneath Him
and the guy just Falls 800 feet into a s it's like what the [ __ ] it's so scary
it's like it's like like imagine so like I'm sitting here right now and then like 50 years ago someone did something 30
yards that way and then it caused the hill that I'm on to [ __ ] collapse as I'm sitting on like it's terrifying so I
actually love researching engine disasters kind of getting a sense that y'all like to hear about them so I might just keep going with this topic but
we'll see TBD like I mentioned in the beginning uh it is a holiday season people are going to be in stores I
wanted to do something that kind of touched on that so that's what I'm going to be doing today I'm going to be touching on a store that existed in the
bustling lovely stunning city of Soul South
Korea you'll notice I use the past tense existed because the store no longer exists if you want to avoid a disaster
in department store of this holiday season stay tuned for our sponsor this week's episode of Doom to
fail is brought to you by NA Studio are you looking for some holiday merch for a friends gift exchange a fun gift for a
sibling secret santa check out the collection of inappropriate holiday sweaters and gifts from nauy Studio we
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off your order that's noty Studio we'll put the link in our show notes and happy holidays from us
thanks and the name of the store is the Sam Pung department
store okay so I'm going to do this in three acts we're going to go into the
background the accident itself and then how it happened okay so act one the
background we're going to start with soul itself so Souls history is [ __ ]
insane like what a haunted tortured City like this thing has been shelled into
Oblivion by like every country in and around the Korean Peninsula at one point
was actually taken over 100% by North Korea and then artillery into
non-existence until it was taken back like there's a lot going on there but long story short is that it is um so
South Korea it's on the Korean Peninsula the southern part of it is South Korea the northern part of it that
touches China is North Korea and soul sits on the
Northwestern or sorry yeah yeah is that right yeah it's the Northwestern part of
the Korean Peninsula so it's very very close to North Korea it's actually only 30 miles it is 30 miles from Soul to Dem
military zone and by the way it's the most one of the most bustling cities ever it is the fourth um largest city by
population of any metropolitan area it's [ __ ] huge and it's gorgeous like if you look up pictures of it it I was like
this is La like the downtown there's a picture of downtown LA with the mountains behind it you're like wow this
looks absolutely stunning there's tons of those in North Korea or South Korea and soul like it is a beautiful bustling
Lively active city um with a ton of history behind it there's a picture I
saw that I I I think people have seen before that's really stunning but it like shows you what kind of a country South Korea is it's at night it was
taken by the International Space Station and it shows South Korea and China at night
from space and you're like there's an ocean between them you're like there isn't that's North Korea it is just like
a dead zone it is so sad I mean it's sad like I mean it's really [ __ ] sad like
it when you when you when you look at like what soul looks like South Korean General looks like and you're like holy
[ __ ] like these people are like the hardest working most IND industrious
smartest most like it's just like and then like you look 30 miles above it
you're like what the [ __ ] happened it's just crazy it's crazy to me that I mean
I think we talked about this before but like that something's happening in North Korea we don't know and the people there
don't know and like I watched this one documentary where a doctor because like doctors from the rest of the world will
go there try to help people and there was one that did like cataract surgery and like made a whole bunch of people be
able to see again it's like a very simple surgery that they can do everywhere else in the world they would do it and these people would do it and they'd be able to see again and they
would go run up to a picture of the leader and be like thank you supreme leader for this blessing being able to
do this and you're like he's you could have just had this if you anywhere else so wild yeah so but like that's kind of
a backdrop on what this event is that we're going to be talking about it's that you have a a country like South
Korea where it has been a [ __ ] War it was ja Japanese occupied then it went
through the Korean War it was [ __ ] sheld it was battered into non-existence it rebuilt itself some of your volcano
conversation where in the 60s and 70s basically like development started
ramping fairly significantly because the 1950s was the Korean War that's when basically there was no South Korea or
there was no soul and then all of a sudden they come out of that and then they started doing economic re re
vitalization rapidly building and expanding the city in 1988 um Soul was
Award of the Olympic Games and in the leadup to this there was a massive
[ __ ] expansion and blowup of construction because a there was nothing
there after the war and so they started building because of the war but beyond
that the Olympics obviously caused them to exceed even their standard goals of
building so that's kind of the backdrop that the story falls into is you have a
country that is basically push to the very limits in terms of capacity to
build with an absolute need to build and where that happens [ __ ] goes wrong
it seems like so in 1987 there was a company called the S group who decided
to build an apartment complex in the Gang region of Soul it's predominantly
known as being one of the wealthiest parts of the country it has been liken to Beverly Hills and things of that
nature so like so for example Samsung's headquarters is based in the Gangam
region Hyundai's headquarters are based in the Gangam region and then all the other now massive conglomerates that
Supply those companies is also headquartered there so that's what we're talking about uh and the time the sampun
group they owned what was um previously a landfill essentially in that area and what they thought was let's capitalize
on the increased property values we'll build an apartment building in this area make a shitload of money there's not any
any affordable housing here anyway so whatever so they retained this firm called woen construction to build
it this is like so typical like reminds me every startup I've ever been at so halfway through the construction project
a new chairman of this group was installed this guy's name was Lee June
I'm G be talking about him quite a bit later on and this is a part that's like very typical it's like when a new leader
comes in and they [ __ ] don't know [ __ ] but they feel like they know [ __ ] and they start making changes and flip
like just sketching stuff out and it's just like leave it alone man like you really
had why is it so common it's so it's always awful you're like he's like oh I
all these things you're like we've been doing this for like 10 years like can you just listen to us and they're like no I know all these things like leave me
the [ __ ] like it's so typical it's so this guy comes
in this building that they contracted with woong had already been half built
and he decided again no context no background of construction or anything he decides [ __ ] it I don't want an
apartment building I want a department store I have a question for you Faris if
I'm moving into a new building is there a way to see who built it and if they have are
qualified I mean you probably have to go to the city because there's permits that were filed that's probably your only
option an alert that's like this building was built by a guy who just wanted to build a big building should we
like start a a startup that like just makes it easy to pull permits yes like
when you go to an elevator and it says like go to the front desk for the elevator thing and I'm like [ __ ] you I know it's not there yeah that guy's not
going to know [ __ ] Like Larry hanging out vaping looking cool yeah
no so so this guy decides halfway through the project we're going to build
a department building [ __ ] this department idea it's not going to work so doing that means installing one
additional floor installing elevators and most importantly cutting into major
support columns so they can increase the retail space inside this building can
something else yes I'm going to interrupt you every single five seconds because I have a lot to say about this so when I was in college I lived in a
dorm that was like a 30 story building like was like a it's it's apartment I lived on the ninth floor but all of the
rooms had weird um like beams that kind of would like go through the wall so it
kind be like a shelf on your wall like a beam that came out and like across it because it used to be an office building and when was an office building it was
fine but turned into Apartments it swayed too much for apartments because like Office Buildings
sway so they don't fall over but it was too much sway for apartments in the middle of the night you'd be like no no
so they had to add more support uh that's actually going to come up here in a minute great so yes please
do like stop me and reject um so the idea was that with an apartment building
you can basically install support structures almost anywhere you want because look I'm in a room right now
you're in a room we're all in a room like like you could put a support beam over there I want to [ __ ] know you put it over there there there it's like
you're surrounded by walls and you can hide supporting structures Within Walls
that's different in a retail space or Warehouse because it depend it is the
function depends on the ability to access Wide Open Spaces you can't just
stack them with support beams so that's a key difference in architecture of a
apartment building a hotel whatever and a warehouse so on and so forth so
knowing knowing that this guy Lee wanted to change the structure of this half-built building halfway through wung
the fir they hire to do the building they bowed out they they said they're uncomfortable with the changes I'm not
going to do this and they were like they paid whatever fines they had to pay for bwing out of the contract and breaking
their contract and Lee June the chairman that was recently assault said [ __ ] it
there was also a construction business as part of Sam group and he was like we'll just
reutilize our own firm which again he just took over his chairman to finish
this project so picture-wise it looks like any other big box big big box store uh it's
painted bright pink for some reason so it looks a little bit little bit weird and like off-putting uh the key is that
there is a north and south wing and those seem like pretty critical structural components to the building
and then there's a middle section and that's kind of like the shopping area like the way I would it's weird like
when I first saw it I was like this looks like Caesar's Palace like it looks like the old original Caesar's Palace where it's like has these tall towers
then like the units are kind of in between that's kind of the setup of it
so typically in buildings like this the construction uh the construction type is to use a steel skeletal structure it's
how every modern retail space operates it's how every retail space it's how
every warehouse and it's how every skyscraper is built because steel can
Flex it can move and that is critical when you're dealing with a shitload of
weight in a ton of levels above you in this
case Le jun's construction firm decided to use what's called a flat slab
construction which mean is a slab of concrete that makes up the floors and then there's support columns in between
them and they're usually spaced out in this case about 36 feet apart from each other so a ton of little things in
between but what that essentially also means is that the top floor was
responsible for supporting its weight but the floor below was
responsible for supporting its weight Plus the top floor the one below that supported all three and so on and so
forth make sense like this reminds me of the Kansas City collapse because it's like you're counting on the thing above
you to like do more work than it should do or whatever you know the amount of work that this thing was designed to do
it would have done if it was constructed the way it was designed to do that's not what happened so the
building was completed and open to the public in July 7th of 199 1990 so the
events we're going to discuss happened 5 years after the building was built so the building stood for 5 years so let's
go into the accident itself so in April of 1995 the first signs kind of started
arising when employees started noticing cracks on the fifth floor which is the top floor the thing was built into or
sorry the thing was designed to be four floors tall they decided later again
halfway through construction they're going to add a fifth floor and the fifth floor would be a food court and and it's
on this floor that they started noticing cracks and buckling happening on the floor that connects the slab to the
columns it's also worth noting that the air conditioning unit for the entire building was on top of the fifth floor
sitting on top of the roof so a month later in June the number
of cracks increased in this area on the fifth floor to the point where the management closed the top floor down and
they brought in a civil engineering firm to inspect in the s engineering firm was basically like very simply yeah not good
this thing's going to collapse that sounds very smart yeah like freaking engineers and have them tell you what
you do it's like I I can barely color between lines on a coloring book and I
could tell you this building's going to collapse it's basically how the engineers framed it so the store's
leadership called an emergency meeting and they were trying to figure out what to do and everyone was of the opinion of
hey we should evacuated this building and hire a firm to come in and try and fix this up that's the only thing to do
and Lee was the boss and he goes no I'm not going to close the building down because if we do that we're going to
lose tons of revenue for sales that day and I'm like later on I was like what on
Earth could his logic have been are we just going to keep this open in perpetuity knowing full well we're like
this thing is going to collapse like I I don't I don't understand what his thought process was he sounds like a he
sounds like a guy who probably shouldn't have been in leadership on June 29th at 5:52 p.m. the
building started producing a cracking sound and store employees against the
wishes of management sounded an alarm and instructed everybody to get the [ __ ] out of the building [ __ ] yeah good job
that's don't don't worry about your job save your life don't worry about your job like yeah yeah yeah it's like the
911 thing didn't you tell people were like I'm G to listen to my boss my boss somebody to go upstairs and like stand 100% because you get you and I feel like
I would have done the same thing you'd be like worried you know what's happening you look to this boss who has no idea like your boss at your hedge
fund or at your like Macy's isn't a civil engineer you know like yeah yeah
well so here's the problem the problem is that with with a structural issue like this it has a compounding domino
effect every failure compounds the next failure two times so by the time you
can notice something going on it is fooked like there is no coming back so
at this point it was way too late what ended up happening was the air
conditioning unit on the top floor which is the fifth floor it caved into the
fifth floor which then caved into the fourth the third so on all the way down
to two sub basements oh my God around 2,000 people were inside when this
happened except for Lee the chairman not who like evacuated himself but left his
like he left his son-in-law inside so oh well it says a lot about how he felt about his son-in-law yeah exactly and so
he managed to evacuate but in total of the 2,000 people that were inside the building 502 people were basically
killed instantly and then 1,500 were trapped in the rubble and if you look at pictures
of this what you'll see is a north and south Wing like I mentioned earlier they're still standing and the entire
Center is completely caved in so
that it's good that it didn't collapse but it kind of [ __ ] over the rescue
the fact that those two didn't collapse because the city was like these two towers that are not meant to stand on
their own are now standing here we can't send people into this thing because they're going to they could collapse on
top of them CU these things sometimes like they
don't all collapse it's like part of it collapses you know so there's like that line where you could be like standing there and be like oh my
God yeah just in front of me there's nothing all of a sudden like open a door and there's nothing all of a sudden that was also a horror movie what
was that horror movie where like it was a day after tomorrow or something no I don't remember it happened in San
Andreas I remember yes yes they're at that restaurant in La and they open the door and then there's nothing there
thank you Taylor she just wear her friends I've already told you that my mom says that she's watched San Andreas
a bunch because she really likes it and I was like that's crazy and also good for you yeah great for her that's a
[ __ ] awesome [Laughter] movie so long story short was that
basically this rescue operation held still it didn't move at all because what they were trying to do was tie these
guide wires to the the structure that was still standing so they could retain it in place so it didn't a collapse on
to rescuer so that's what they did and once they achieved that basically Rescuers went in and out of the 1500
people that were assumed stuck inside about 150 people were dragged out still alive except obviously really really
badly wounded I did read that they ended up rescuing one person who managed to five up to 14 or 17 days uh one yeah
insane 17 days days so one thing that's crazy that is like another direct parallel to the Kansas City thing was
that after this thing collapsed obviously all Water and Sewer lines are collaps in as well and so people who
were alive mentioned that like yeah there was a lot of people around me and they all just [ __ ] drowned because they're all pinned underneath concrete
blocks and the water's Rising because this thing is getting flooded and they just drowned kind of crazy yeah
so two weeks is where their cut off was so after two weeks they were like anybody that's inside this thing is
probably dead obviously one person wasn't probably more but like one person for sure wasn't they rescued that person and so they decided after that this
period of time we're going to convert this into a rescue operation so they ended up doing that and then clearing
out the space obviously nobody was happy with lee lee was kind of a pig and [ __ ]
in this situation and he was dragged into court and it was like one thing
that was like incredible was he kept talking about like how much This
Disaster impacted him financially people like there's like you
killed like a small village worth of people with your NE oh my God and so he ended up getting 10 and a
half years in prison uh his son Lee's son was also the CEO of the store itself
that entity that the Su pong department store did his son-in-law die his son-in-law did die
yeah purpose he got his son out though yeah uhhuh he got the CEO out very
suspicious and and so his son ended up getting years in prison um it's great to
know that Lee got out of jail and was like maybe alive for like two years before he died like he that's like all
he's known for is like being responsible for this um there was a city administrator who was responsible for
certifying the safety of the building who accepted a bribe from Lee uh he ended up getting three years in prison
for bribery three years three years should be forever [ __ ] insan it should be [ __ ] forever
unbelievable and then the families themselves ended up getting about $360,000 each uh that came out of the
budget from the city of Soul itself as well as Le and his family's personal wealth um so yeah that's and today what
stands on top of this haunted [ __ ] landscape is a luxury apartment building
which is like horrific to think about oh no there's lots of ghosts in that
building so act three is what ended up happening so the design of the building
was so the design of the building was fine what they did with that design was
all bad so okay like I said the application of this building was never meant to hold a wide open space it was
meant to be an apartment and what was clear is that what ended up happening to
this building is what is referred to as a punching Shear
so what this is is essentially when the okay so you you look at a floor I'm
holding my hands up in ta this is for the benefit of Tor nobody that's actually listening so you have a four
and then you have poles that or whatever you have like columns that run through the center of it right and the idea is
that like the The Columns are holding the weight of that floor eventually there can be a
situation where the pressure weight and force on that concrete slab is enough to
punch through the column underneath it so that's what ended up happening here
but why would something like this happen so again they basically did everything wrong and on the cheap side in the
interest of what Lee wanted to do from an economic perspective so for one The Columns that supported the fls legally
were supposed to be 31 in thick the thicker they are the more weight they can bear all that in this case they were
reduced to 24 in thick and the reason was to increase for SP for space for
retail S Sales the other problem was there was misalignment of the columns on a 4 to
four level so basically what it means is that you don't have one column that goes
all the way to the top you have a column that goes up two floors then it breaks and then there's another column in 404
to five so on and so forth which means that you can't count on the columns
underneath you to help support your weight because they they're not there the other thing is the slabs that the
fours were made of themselves so we heard a lot about this during the Titan submersible disaster which was like the
thing that was made out of carbon fiber everybody kept talking about how car carbon fiber is incredibly strong under
tensile strength or um yeah it's incredibly stronger tensile
strength but under compression it's weak that's what happens with concrete
like obviously con you can't bend a piece of conrete like you you only break a piece of concrete you can't bend right
right it's not like a yes I yeah and so what what we do what Engineers do is
they insert rebar which is steel reinforced barbing into concrete so that
it gives it the tensile flexibility so it can Flex a little bit without breaking that's the idea of rebar uh in
this case each slab was supposed to hold 16 pieces of rebar and it didn't each uh
slab hold held half that it held eight pieces of rebar so that was not good either which means that it didn't have
enough of the tensile strength to not break under any weight pressure force or what
have you the last issue was weight
so basically the building was never designed with a fifth FL the guy decided to add a fifth FL because he wanted a
restaurant on top of his building and so he added a restaurant and on top of that
restaurant he added what was or not on top but in the in the um the flooring of
that restaurant he inserted this um hosing like this copper hosing that uh
circulates water the reason was that in at this at least at this time I don't know if it's all common but in South
Korea the custom is you eat on the floor like you sit on the floor you sit down you eat there sure and he wanted the
floor to be warm so people feel comfortable so now you have all the
weight of the so they increased the thickness of the concrete on the fifth floor that was never designed to exist
and they started running tubing through it along with water so they increased the weight dramatically the other thing was the air
conditioning so it's called a 15 ton unit which apparently isn't the actual weight of
the unit itself the actual weight of the unit itself was 50 tons I think that has to do with the capacity it has t
whatever it is so this was installed on the roof um what was problematic about what they
did here so first off it was obvious that when this thing kicked on it was causing issues anyways like it was like
it was way it was the source of a lot of the fractures of the column on the fifth floor but the bigger problem was
everybody complained about it the neighbors complained about this thing and so the management instead of doing
what you should have done which is airlift or crane this thing into a new spot they r
across the ceiling which applied the maximum weight across all the other
columns causing one of them to crack severely and is that what started it like
officially officially what they think started it is it every single time this was like a known thing with the store
employees was when they kickstarted this thing anytime it turned on you because every time an air conditioning unit
starts on like does a thing they noticed that like there was like a 3 and 1/2
inch Gap that was forming in the columns around the air conditioning unit so
there suspition was when this thing turns on it is quaky this entire building and so that is the Assumption
the assumption is this thing kicked on and it already shattered and fractured these columns to the extent that like
they were no longer supportive and so they cave to the air conditioning caved and all of a sudden you have a 50 tons
hitting the floor oh my God velocity and it just started pancaking everything all
the way down so that was basically how it all ended up coming down um like I
said ultimately everybody went to jail everybody went to jail what's funny is
they said that the building if it had been built as designed would have been
two and a half times stronger than it needed to be to basically stand
um all the other little changes they did so for example Le to in to install
elevators or um escalators not elevators to install escalators they had to cut
into the support supporting structures in the middle of the building like all stuff they did at the interest of making
it a retail space ultimately is what caused it to Pancake onto the ground is sad so
yeah have fun shopping do you think that people who
like do those original plans add on all those things to make it so much stronger because they know people are going to
[ __ ] it up I don't know I think I think everybody's just looking out for their own ass like one thing that we learned
from the Hyatt the Regency Hyatt disaster is that you in these
situations you know in a lot of situ here like Taylor with our jobs like if we [ __ ] up a company might lose some
money right might get fired like who gives a [ __ ] these guys have a different level
of like liability like they are criminally I mean this guy the son was held um went to jail for criminal
homicide or homicide whatever it was like like it is a different standard and so my assumption is that they overbuild
these things like I so don't want to get sodomized in a prison like
you know I mean like that's probably like what they're mostly thinking that's what I would be thinking no totally and
that but and I think then also they have the assumption that like someone's going to mess it up or that yeah that too but
in this case so the um builder in this case said [ __ ] it I'm not going to build this to your spec I'll build it to the
spec that it was designed but I'm not going to build it to your new spec so wung was the original Builder they're
like [ __ ] this this guy's going he's trying to tell me to like cut into like architectural supports dude the fact
that this thing stood for five years is incredible like so yeah it was it was a it was all
bad it was all bad it was really sad it's actually the second biggest n or
sorry the second biggest accidental collapse of a building in world history
uh there's one more that's bigger and that is in Bangladesh but info on it was
like it's Bangladesh so it's kind of hard to come by but um I might try and dig deeper into that one at some later
date so uh these are so scary I love them yeah because because you're not
doing anything wrong yeah you're just like at the store you're just like whatever or like you have your job at
the Macy's and like you're just whatever and you're like something weird but you don't say anything because you don't you
just trust that where you are is safe yeah um so so last night for reasons
that I that are probably stupid we ended up deciding that we're going to go out on Sixth Street and I [ __ ] hate going
out on Sixth Street cuz I'm nearly 40 years old I'm not 21 and it's just full of like 20 year olds that are [ __ ] [ __ ]
wasted and doing stupid things and we go whatever it was a good time it was whatever and we came home and then I
remember think myself I was like this is like outside of my risk profile like I'm not someone that's like
I'm going to go out drinking on a busy street with a bunch of college like it's just like so many things can go wrong I
mean you're dealing with like 22y olds who trying to get laid and meet people like you know it's just like it's just not my see what's funny is not funny but
like about an hour and a half after I left there was a shooting a block from where I was this weekend yeah so playing
all the [ __ ] time in Austin so somebody was like waving a gun around or doing something cops showed up shot the
person in the head and then somehow either through the victim or the guy who started the whatever somebody ended up
shooting three people on accident um accident what does that even mean I I
I think I mean like I think I mean like it might have been the cops it might have been the cops who accidentally fired in their crowd what you don't
accidentally fire into a crowd I mean it's six street so was pretty busy but yeah so like so but but
it made me think I was like I was like that's a situation where like I knew I was taking on a new risk profile but if
you if you were like far as um we should get something for our parents let's go to the store I'd be like there's no risk
like what the [ __ ] could possibly go wrong well I mean like remember the other day when we were at the builtmore and we were going to that Winery and we
heard gunshots oh yeah that was fun and you were like what if I just got shot in the head right now be like and I was like
I'd be like Jackie Kennedy because I would get your brains in my hand but also that's very serious like someone could have been shooting us from the
parking lot because man that's crazy Austin that's scary so wild yeah it was
like an hour after we left there was a [ __ ] shooting it was lit a block away like we were like at the bar there was a
block away I was like all right well that's life then but like that's the part of the engineering stuff that
freaks me out it's like it's like there's no R there should be no risk yeah it's like what can you do like if I
go to my local grocery store and the [ __ ] collapses on me while I'm trying to buy some Pento cheese which I love
PTO cheese but like if I trying to buy Pento cheese yeah delicious um
yeah gosh that's crazy so we learned about punching
shears we learn about weight loads we learned that vaping makes you look cool and young I look 16
again um so yeah it's just where we're going to leave it that's terrible but
super interesting I I hadn't heard about that yeah it's a it's a gross awful but
also interesting one man I want to go to Soul so bad it looks [ __ ] incredible it looks so like what an awesome like
culture in people the whole thing is like amazing yeah it looks cool so um sweet
that's you been there yeah thank you let you've been there hey also let us know if like you like the engineering stuff
because like yeah what do you I I like get burned out on like the True Crime stuff CU it's like I can only talk about
someone [ __ ] a dead corpse so many times in my life eventually I want to move on to like other things and like
the engineering stuff is like really interesting you learn about like how things kind of come together and like the science behind it and like I don't
know it's there's a lot of fun stuff there so if you like it let us know how do they let us tell her Doom tood
gmail.com Doom toell pod gmail.com and at all the socials do to
pod see there tell your friends tell your friends tell your families
write to us let us know what you think awesome thank you thank you Taylor than I'm going to close it out and