City-approved plans for the Midtown building that partially collapsed last week show it was required to have steel reinforcements installed on the columns that buckled on the 21st floor, according to Gothamist's review of hundreds of structural drawings. But department of Buildings officials declined to say whether the reinforcing was properly completed.
The plans show the two columns were supposed to be reinforced for 13 stories between the building’s 9th and 21st floors in an area directly beneath a 10-story addition that widened the original structure’s higher floors. The Department of Buildings completed emergency shoring of the building floors from the 9th story to the rooftop in the aftermath of near-collapse.
The developer MetroLoft has been converting the former Pfizer headquarters on East 42nd Street into a 1,600-unit residential complex that includes adding tens of thousands of square feet to the original 33-story building, making it the largest such project in the city.
The structural plans approved by the Department of Buildings called for reinforcement around the structure’s original I-shaped steel columns, which would make them appear as a rectangular box.
Structural plans submitted to the Department of Buildings depict the reinforcement requirements for the steel columns.
Department spokesperson Andrew Rudansky declined to say whether the reinforcing was properly completed, or whether shoddy construction was certified by a special inspection agency hired to review structural steel and welding.
Rudansky said the agency is still investigating the exact cause of the incident. Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Investigation have also been probing the incident and have requested information from the buildings agency, as Gothamist previously reported.
An initial complaint summary posted by the Department of Buildings to its website in the immediate aftermath of the near-disaster on July 7 explicitly blamed the buckled columns on inadequate reinforcement.
“Failure to provide steel reinforcement as per approved plans led to the cause of the incident,” the note read, according to a since-deleted version of the complaint shared with Gothamist.
But buildings department officials later removed the line from its website.
“Last week, one of our staff members at DOB typed in the initial disposition which was not accurate,” Rudansky said in a written statement. “This was shortly corrected the same day.”
Structural plans show a column that buckled on the 21st story and the ones below it were to be reinforced down to the 9th floor. An adjacent column that buckled was also to be reinforced, along with lower columns down to the 7th floor.
In an interview with the New York Times the day of the structural failure, MetroLoft Principal Nathan Berman said he suspected the two columns were not properly reinforced. Berman has declined interview requests from Gothamist. A MetroLoft spokesperson declined to comment on the specific cause of the structural failure.
Eugene Gurevich, a structural engineer with the firm RAND Engineering & Architecture, said it appeared that the reinforcement approved by the Department of Buildings was supposed to account for the additional weight of the expansion.
He questioned whether the welds used to install the reinforcement plates was sufficient when reviewing photos of the buckled columns that were released by the FDNY and Department of Buildings.
The structural plans called for one 2-inch weld every foot, rather than a continuous weld down the entire length of the column.
“You can't in a cursory review like this know exactly what happened, but it looks like there are drawings that are addressing these problems directly and calling out reinforcement,” Gurevich said. “If there was reinforcement, was it sufficient? Was it installed correctly and was it inspected?”
Rudansky declined to say whether shoddy construction was certified by a special inspection agency hired to review structural steel and welding.
FDNY drone imagery shows a buckled steel structural member inside the office-to-residential conversion project at 235 E. 42nd St., where officials say two structural columns failed and floors above began to sag.
Courtesy of FDNY.Chris Cerino, past president of the Structural Engineers Association of New York, said if reinforcing was installed, the investigation will also likely target the “weld capacity.”
But if it wasn’t added, or it was added incorrectly, that would reveal serious errors in construction and safety checks, he said.
“If reinforcing plates were missed, how did this escape quality control and special inspections?” he said.
Domani Inspection Services, the company hired to perform safety inspections, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did GACE Consulting Engineers, the company that drafted the structural plans.
Structural engineer Eric Cowley said the extent of the failure was greater than he would expect if the columns had been correctly reinforced.
“That’s no trivial bend. That’s a total failure,” he added. “That’s an amazing amount of deformation.”
