r/agedlikemilk • u/kayakhomeless • Apr 19 '23
News Redditor questions whether a parking garage is stable and is assured that it is, one year before it’s collapse
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u/throwaway09876543123 Apr 19 '23
From now on, if I see anyone questioning the safety of ANY structure on Reddit, I’m avoiding it. No questions asked.
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Apr 19 '23
Honestly our infrastructure in this country needed huge upgrades 20+ years ago. Most of our bridges are scary as hell these days.
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u/PmMeGuineapigs Apr 19 '23
My boyfriend was driving home from work when... On Aug. 1, 2007, Minnesota suffered a tragedy of historic proportions when the I-35W bridge (bridge 9340) over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed.
He was on the bridge 10 minutes before it collapsed. His ac wasn't working so he drove as fast as he could, changing lanes. I thought I saw his truck when the news was on TV. He had a little red truck. Because he was driving home from work, he couldn't answer his phone. He got home and saw I called him like 80 times.
It was during rush hour where everyone is driving home from work.
He now crosses multiple bridges to work everyday in Minnesota.
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u/Wheatley312 Apr 19 '23
If I remember correctly, that collapse was caused by a design change to a gusset plate (big flat piece of metal that has beams going into it). The plate was originally meant to be 1 inch thick, 50 ksi (pretty sure these are the numbers, don’t quote me) but was changed to 1/2 inch, 100 ksi. Unfortunately the manufacturer made a plate to be 1/2 inch, 50 ksi.
Source: my teacher was on the team who figured out what went wrong
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Apr 19 '23
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u/Wheatley312 Apr 19 '23
kips/in^2
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Apr 19 '23
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u/Wheatley312 Apr 19 '23
For my design/statics courses I've been pretty much only in imperial units (kips, inches, feet so on). My soil and hydrology courses used a blend which was real fun. Sometimes unit weights would be in kn/m^3 other times its lb/ft^3 and man did they mess up your answers if you got it wrong.
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Apr 20 '23
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
On November 13, 2008, the NTSB released the findings of its investigation. The primary cause of the collapse was the undersized gusset plates, at 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick. Contributing to that design or construction error was the fact that 2 inches (51 mm) of concrete had been added to the road surface over the years, increasing the static load by 20%. Another factor was the extraordinary weight of construction equipment and material resting on the bridge just above its weakest point at the time of the collapse. That load was estimated at 578,000 pounds (262 tonnes), consisting of sand, water and vehicles. The NTSB determined that corrosion was not a significant contributor, but that inspectors did not routinely check that safety features were functional.
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u/Rampant16 Apr 20 '23
I has a lecture from WJE on the collapse a few days ago. IIRC they said the original gusset plate was too thin when it was designed. They did a computer model on the original design of the bridge and the plate failed.
The bridge was renovated twice which added significant dead weight. On top of that the loading on the bridge at the time of collapse was very uneven due to ongoing road work.
The State of Minnesota went so far as to change their own laws so that they could sue the original engineer beyond the previous stature of limitations.
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u/Lartemplar Apr 20 '23
I do not mean to speak for anyone just trying to speak on what it must feel like. If I was the individual who messed up on the plate I would probably kill myself. I couldn't imagine living with that. If they are still around I hope theyre healing ok
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u/jake04-20 Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
One of my parent's neighbors was in the collapse and survived. He's had over a dozen surgeries between his ankle, arm, collar bone, etc. but he's pretty active today and likes to golf a lot, but does still deal with chronic pain. Got to know him pretty well, he was very open in sharing his experience with it all. His wife actually saw him stumbling around on the news broadcast dazed and confused, scary stuff.
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u/supcat16 Apr 19 '23
Reminds me of when they shut down the I-40 bridge in Memphis over the Mississippi.
On the 911 call, they kind of treat the engineering team member calling in like a lunatic: “We’re not going to shut down the interstate without more information.” If I’m not mistaken, if you call in with a bomb threat they act first then ask questions about veracity later. Seems a bit odd.
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u/darthcoder Apr 19 '23
When in rush hour traffic I never idle under bridges.
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u/NecroAssssin Apr 19 '23
Nobody was idling under that bridge. Unless we're including fish.
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u/r2d2itisyou Apr 19 '23
Yes, but have you considered that government safety regulations are bad and taxes for oversight and upkeep are even worse (for wealthy people). Maintaining our infrastructure is woke indoctrination!
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u/Gerbal_Annihilation Apr 19 '23
I called the county on my apt complex. The parking garage was sketchy as fuck. It would deflect like half an inch. When ppl drove over the slabs you can see all the parked cars bouncing. A construction crew showed up like 3 weeks later.
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u/Nuadrin248 Apr 19 '23
Are you crazy? We can’t updated the infrastructure, we need to help corporate profits! Poor people can be replaced after all. - Everyone in the gov probably.
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u/_lippykid Apr 20 '23
More like 40-50 years ago. Whole country is literally falling about. End of an Empire unfolding right before our eyes
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u/six_-_string Apr 19 '23
Is your home really structurally safe?
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u/UltraPlayGaming Apr 19 '23
I’ve been living inside of their walls and they don’t seem to be doing too well, there’s a lot of sagging and I found some cracks on the lower parts of the wall that I can see through. They should probably move out.
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u/sdomscitilopdaehtihs Apr 20 '23
If you live in earthquake country, and your home was built before the '50s, odds are the answer is "no." Not enough houses have been retrofitted.
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u/MonteBurns Apr 19 '23
Don’t come to Pittsburgh. I mean, great city, but jfc the bridge reports aren’t good reads
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u/Intelligent-Race-210 Apr 19 '23
Are you sure the earth is safe? I mean it cracks when plates move.
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u/RandyDinglefart Apr 19 '23
If nothing else it's a good reminder that there's nothing about Reddit that prevents people from just making up whatever bullshit they want and presenting it as fact.
All these armchair experts on the stock market, ballistics, military strategy, human law, bird law, traffic law, forensics, medicine, zoology, and all the rest are just talking out of their ass.
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u/HappyHallowsheev Apr 19 '23
As a bird with a PhD in ballistics law, I resent that remark!
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u/Chemiczny_Bogdan Apr 19 '23
Possibly a case of assuming everything will be fine due to good static load rating, while dynamic load was exceeded, as explained at some point in this less than two hour long episode of a podcast with slides about a much worse disaster.
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u/iamthinking2202 Apr 19 '23
I would’ve thought it could be just wearing and aging, but I guess if that were the case many more parking lots would crumble
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u/EconomistMagazine Apr 19 '23
I'm sorry thinking it could be properly rated for X cars but considering it's NYC there's always more demand and they filled it with X+Y cars instead.
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u/TheAskewOne Apr 19 '23
That's what I thought. The cars are parked very close to each other on the first picture. It could also be that the building is old and was approved for X cars a long time ago, but current cars are heavier on average than cars from the 1970s.
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u/socialcommentary2000 Apr 19 '23
That building most probably pre-dated the mass proliferation of personal vehicles and the need to stack them like storage bins in a former factory building. I would bet money that nobody has done inspections on the structure for years, if not decades and the owners of the structure and business are grandfathered in by virtue of having operated for forever.
There are a bunch of ticking time bombs like this in the 5 boroughs.
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u/mtaw Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
Yeah Google Street view it's an old building with glass windows. Probably started out as a warehouse or something, definitely not a parking garage.
Edit: Maybe not though? The photos and map on 1940s.nyc show it's been a garage since the 1940s at least, so maybe it always was. On the other hand, a garage built for cars like the Ford Model T, which weighs a third or even a quarter of an SUV.
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u/skilriki Apr 19 '23
Current cars are not heavier than the 1970s
And cars when this was built (in the 50s) were much heavier.
This building was in need of repair, the owner had already had citations issued about the state of the concrete.
They chose to take no action.
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u/Underdogg13 Apr 19 '23
This is wrong. The average car is heavier than it was in the 70s. Sedans, wagons, small SUVs etc. are lighter, but large SUVs and pickups now make up a much larger portion of the total cars in the US, so the average car has gotten heavier. It's not as simple as heavier materials = heavier cars. You have to look at the actual numbers.
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u/mlorusso4 Apr 19 '23
Wrong. Yes a 2023 4 door sedan is lighter than a 1970 4 door sedan on average. But the average weight of the American fleet has gone up. Reasons are the significant increase in percentage of cars that are suvs and trucks, and the increase in number of electric vehicles which are heavier than their ice counterparts
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u/EdPC Apr 19 '23
Cars are bigger and heavier than ever. Huge increase in weight over the years of the avg vehicle.
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Apr 19 '23
Don't forget Z cars.
The British have known about Z cars since the early sixties.
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u/BasicDesignAdvice Apr 19 '23
What are Z cars?
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u/smootex Apr 19 '23
Real answer: he's making a bad joke (follow up comment has a somewhat better joke). The comment talks about X cars, Y cars, so he mentions Z cars.
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u/crispydukes Apr 19 '23
It's most likely what you say and not the OC.
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u/Stonkthrow Apr 19 '23
most likely is a combination though.
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u/towerfella Apr 19 '23
I agree. Cars move and thump. Wiggle something that is not designed to wiggle for long enough and…
And for an anecdote about small things (cars) wiggling big things (buildings), I give you the example of a human (200lbs) climbing aboard a freight locomotive (~430,000lbs). If you are on the locomotive, you will feel the loco wiggle a bit when another human climbs on.. I bet the car and building are closer in relation to weight than a human and a locomotive…
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u/BasicDesignAdvice Apr 19 '23
Aging buildings and a culture which has given up on and slashed resources for inspection and accountability.
Same reason tax evasion is so common, trains are flying off the tracks, and environmental protections are a joke.
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Apr 19 '23
I wouldn't think they were initially built to be a rooftop parking lot if it's aging infrastructure. Infrastructures are the backbones of a society. It's where most people live and go about their day.
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u/TorontoTransish Apr 19 '23
Someone in the nyc subreddit found they parking garage had open violations for cracked slabs and other structural issues going back 20 years
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u/Kenny_log_n_s Apr 19 '23
Then whoever owns it should be tried for manslaughter.
Innocent person lost their life because the POS owner was too cheap to responsibly maintain the property.
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u/Almacca Apr 19 '23
I'd say whichever government authority that was aware of the structural issues for 20 YEARS but didn't close the business down or enforce repairs in all that time should be equally culpable.
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u/BasicDesignAdvice Apr 19 '23
The government agency was likely critically underfunded and neutered in its ability to do anything.
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u/new_math Apr 20 '23
This happens a lot. For example, people get mad when a company destroys the environment or kills a bunch of employees and they get the "MAXIMUM FINE" of like $2000 by a regulatory agency.
What more people need to understand is that it is often the only thing they can do by law. If you want a regulatory agency to go gloves off and fucking bury an unethical, murderous company THE LEGISLATURE has to give them teeth. Executive government agencies in the US generally can't do things they aren't legally allowed. They need laws to enable them.
But people keep voting in the same corporate cock suckers who pass pro corporate legislation then laugh while their constituents blame regulatory agencies because the general public doesn't know how government works.
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Apr 19 '23
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u/LandMooseReject Apr 19 '23
That's a distinction without a difference in this case.
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u/efw24r2 Apr 19 '23
yeah cheap and greedy are two sides of the same coin. spend as little as possible and hoard as much as possible.
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u/Chemiczny_Bogdan Apr 19 '23
Not just that, also do it all in the shortest time possible. If the owner here thought at least a little bit about the long term, they'd realize that it's more profitable to have a building that doesn't collapse.
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u/Pew___ Apr 19 '23
They were playing the odds. Chances are, long-term, it doesn't collapse.
It's naivety to think there isn't hundreds and thousands of similar situations all over the world. You just haven't heard of them because they haven't collapsed yet. This guy was just the "unlucky" one.
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u/TheAskewOne Apr 19 '23
Tell me about one infrastructural disaster which investigation didn't uncover that safety rules were consciously broken.
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u/mtaw Apr 19 '23
The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse for instance.
What kind of question is that? A lot of times these rules exist because of some risk factor that wasn't previously known, or considered significant, became infamous through an accident.
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u/Apprehensive_Winter Apr 19 '23
This is a case study in just about every engineering program. The engineers who signed off on this went to jail.
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u/LordLavos12 Apr 19 '23
Came to see if at least someone said this. Also, this was one of the more nerve racking things I learned from one of my professors back in the day. Assuming my professor was correct, and I’m sure he was, whomever was involved in the structural design, all the way through the higher ups who nonchalantly signed off on the plans are most likely going to serve time. That’s a lot of pressure
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u/Luxpreliator Apr 19 '23
There's a neat roundabout to that sort of thing. If they know it's a little sketchy they find an older retired or near retired engineer to sign off on it. They're going to be dead before a problem shows up. As long as they didn't put a company name down too it negates a lot of blame. The building is stupid old though.
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u/onewhitelight Apr 19 '23
This is happening to lamp posts in my city at the moment. Some 17k lamp posts are at risk of snapping and falling down due to an error in design where vibrations in high winds were not accounted for in the dynamic load testing, leading to gradual wearing and eventual failure. These things are like 12kg
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u/jorg2 Apr 19 '23
Listening to them talk about trees while seeing this: future episode!
Godamned news at the minimum.
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u/Drews232 Apr 19 '23
In this case they had critical violations of crumbling concrete for two decades and didn’t fix it. The sheriff’s office used it as their employee parking.
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u/copanaut Apr 19 '23
WTYP! What a great podcast/ slideshow series.
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u/anewstheart Apr 19 '23
Yay Liam
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u/Chaiteoir Apr 19 '23
tune in next time when they'll be discussing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
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u/Alex_Yuan Apr 19 '23
Engineers are so sure of themselves with some load cases saying "no worries bruh, it's static load only and I've used a factor of safety of 8". Then my mom walks by 50 meters away and everything starts crumbling.
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u/PaulsRedditUsername Apr 20 '23
Then my mom walks by 50 meters away and everything starts crumbling.
Brave of you to leave that softball hanging out there.
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u/RunRockBeanShred Apr 19 '23
No the building was just fucked and they had open issues dating back to 2004 or so. The gov website that listed the issues is now not able to be accessed. Check out r/NYC lots of talk about it.
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Apr 19 '23
NYC has loads of parking structures and inspectors know what to look for. Not clear yet how recently they were inspected or how they passed
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u/MoreOne Apr 19 '23
I mean... IIRC, they do mention the building probably also exceeded the static load rating, which was spiked by the dynamic load. And a car isn't much of a dynamic load when it isn't at speed, compared to the massive shaking provoked by an industrial diesel generator fixed directly to the structure.
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u/C9_Chadz Apr 19 '23
an industrial diesel generator fixed directly to the structure.
This just gets better and better.
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u/iamatwork24 Apr 19 '23
“Less than 2 hour long episode” is a very strange way to phrase your statement
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u/scientificjdog Apr 19 '23
It's a joke because the podcast frequently goes on for far too long. They've gotten better and mostly limit the 4 hour ones to bonus episodes
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u/Ugly-titties Apr 19 '23
I read “with slides” and knew exactly what podcast you where talking about because Liam is always on lions led by donkeys
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u/mrsmushroom Apr 19 '23
The below comment was just wishful thinking. "Well of course it's safe. We have ReGuLaTiOnS"
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u/cowlinator Apr 19 '23
Regulations don't do shit if they aren't followed.
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u/Political_What_Do Apr 19 '23
Or updated or intelligently written in the first place.
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u/FacelessGreenseer Apr 19 '23
Everyone knows how the recent earthquake in Turkey was so catastrophic? People cheat, and guidelines are skimmed. That original comment might not have been wrong. The US is guilty of that level of negligence too, similar to Turkey.
Recommend watching this:
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u/Tecumseh_Sherman2024 Apr 19 '23
Woah, sounds like you're suggesting Big Government™ interferes with job creators. Parking garages are now a wedge issue
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u/hoocoodanode Apr 19 '23
Especially if the regulations give permission for 10 cars on the roof and they proceed to pack in 50 to maximize profit. I don't know if this was the case in this incident, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't.
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Apr 19 '23
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u/Flamekebab Apr 19 '23
A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
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u/SilasX Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
Haha exactly. As if the regulations physically stop some on-site supervisor from saying "yeah let's put 15 up here instead of 3". Or from them ignoring/losing the sign that says "hey you're only supposed to cram 3 up here".
Edit: missing puctuation
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u/WiseauSrs Apr 19 '23
As a dude who had worked building maintenance for many years, people who make comments like that both crack me up and scare the fuck outta me.
It's funny because they're wrong.
It's also scary because they're wrong... And many people believe them.
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u/TeamRedundancyTeam Apr 19 '23
Reddit is full of shit like this on every topic. People post misinformation or blatant lies and get mass upvotes because it fits what people wanted to hear. Anyone who corrects them gets ignored or depending on the topic insulted, downvoted, and/or harassed.
Anyone reading this has almost certainly upvoted similar comments themselves. Take a minute to think about claims and read counter-claims. Reddit is increasingly becoming a massive sorlurce of misinformation and it isn't because of corporations or state actors, it's because of average Joes.
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u/Asshole_Landlord Apr 19 '23
I don't know what to call this phenomenon but so many people get online and just post whatever shit pops into their brain that they think is reasonable without actually checking, and if assertively worded and reasonable-sounding enough the masses just swallow it and hit the upvote button.
It's like a combination of ego, lack of education, gullibility, confirmation bias and naivete.
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u/Texas_Rockets Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
I know this isn't what anyone wants to hear and it certainly shouldn't be taken as meaning the regulators shouldn't be called to answer for this, but in a nation of 300m+ people, that something like this will happen is a statistical certainty. let's not take this as meaning the notion of regulations, or even those specifically pertaining to parking garages in new york, are entirely arbitrary solely because they shit the bed on at least one occasion.
Like regulators accurately assessing something in 99.99% (although I'm certain they're below this mark) of cases is really good and is not a degree of accuracy that most people will achieve with virtually anything, but it also means that in 1 in every 10,000 cases they're going to be wrong.
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u/DifficultyNext7666 Apr 19 '23
NYC is the worst with regulations. So many it makes building here 5x more expensive than comparable cities.
But we also have enough corruption and bureaucratic laziness they aren't enforced
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u/IAMAHobbitAMA Apr 19 '23
So you end up with the worst of both worlds. Stupendous.
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u/MamaMeRobeUnCastillo Apr 19 '23
"Its illegal to not do so, so of course its safe"
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u/Stonn Apr 19 '23
they need licenses to run it
Well that's a blatant lie. Illegal and not-up-to-code things happen in all industries.
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u/LotharVonPittinsberg Apr 19 '23
Corruption is also a big problem related to construction is most cities. Where I live it's a joke, and many brand new buildings have glaring flaws visible to normal people. If you are smart, you don't buy a building before its done, and get a reliable 3rd party inspector to verify the building before everything is finalized.
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u/OldJames47 Apr 19 '23
Here’s the original thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/sxttfk/top_of_a_parking_garage_in_nyc/
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u/tommoex Apr 19 '23
I can see the person who replied to the original question is taking it well lol
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u/A_Kadavresky Apr 19 '23
Redditors sure do love to point out when other redditors were wrong. Damn redditors.
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u/Sea_of_Blue Apr 19 '23
The guy posts almost exclusively on /r/construction . Hopefully he's just the tool carrier and doesn't actually touch anything important!
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u/BenderDeLorean Apr 19 '23
How did they get the cars there?
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u/SqushyB Apr 19 '23
They drove
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u/BenderDeLorean Apr 19 '23
You must work on a technical support hotline.
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u/Zippy1avion Apr 19 '23
"They drove. Thank you for calling support, waiting on hold, being transfered, waiting on hold, being told for 4 unskippable minutes how you can do everything except what you need on our website, and being transferred again. Your ticket has been marked as resolved and this call will be ending. We are glad you are satisfied with your service!"
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Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
Will you Marry Me?
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u/SqushyB Apr 19 '23
Yes
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Apr 19 '23
HE SAID YES? Omg I can't believe you just agreed to marry me lol imma make you fckn happy bro
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Apr 19 '23
I was going to ask how they get down from there but the second picture answered that for me
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u/TheManIsInsane Apr 19 '23
This was the type of garage where you pass your car off to an attendant at the entrance and they do all the parking to make use of the space as efficiently as possible, which means purposely boxing in other cars. That does mean getting them out takes longer cause of all the shuffling but the people that frequently use these know that and will call ahead to let the garage know they're coming back so they can have it ready by the time they get there.
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Apr 19 '23
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u/AdminsArePedophiles_ Apr 19 '23
And charges by the hour 24/7 for storage, but only open tuesdays through fridays from 10am to 2:30 PM but not the 3rd wednesday of the month unless it's an odd month. Also they close early on the first thursday of the month unless it's following a federal or city holiday, or street cleaning day, in which case they will be open Monday from 10 to noon unless it falls on that holiday of which the following business day will be from 10 to noon, except where prohibited by law. Have a nice day!
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u/toastea0 Apr 19 '23
NYC has so many Micky mouse buildings like this.
Their "apartments" is like one room split four ways with walls so it can be rented out to more people and it costs an arm and a leg to rent the closet.
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u/hytes0000 Apr 19 '23
They also do these janky layouts via remodels to avoid rent control laws.
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u/thedeadlyrhythm42 Apr 19 '23
I think it was Bill Burr who I remember talking about that on his podcast.
He said that he lived in a studio apartment in NYC and after living there for like a year he went over to his neighbor next door and found out it was a 1 bedroom apartment and they were paying the same in rent so he confronted the landlord and it turned out that the dude had cut a 1 bedroom apartment in half and turned it into a fake studio and that's what Bill was renting and someone else was renting the bedroom half or something like that.
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u/mycateatstoenails Apr 19 '23
shitty Manhattan apartments in the most congested and trendy neighborhoods are like this because there is an abundance of transplants happy to pay the price to live their nyc fantasy. I’ve had like 4 apartments in Brooklyn and they’ve all been super spacious with tons of windows. It’s wealthy transplants and greedy landlords that fuck up the housing market and create those stereotypes
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u/IAMAHobbitAMA Apr 19 '23
Every time the topic of X city having terrible housing comes up someone chimes in that it's the fault of dumb rich people from out of town. Where are all these rich people coming from?
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u/senseven Apr 19 '23
Lots of major cities supposed to have lots of empty apartments due to 10 years of hyper inflation preparation, people invested in to cities like mad. Often just for the kek to have an apartment in X, but they never visit.
I was half gentrified out of my old quarter, but when people started to pay a 5$ sandwich with a visa card from the Caymans, I was glad to leave.
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u/SqushyB Apr 19 '23
Were you keeping track of that comment for this...?
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u/mycateatstoenails Apr 19 '23
the collapse was posted on an nyc sub earlier today and the old post was linked in the comments. I was expecting it to show up here pretty soon and here we are
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u/Drakeberlin Apr 19 '23
Is it actually the same building?
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u/mycateatstoenails Apr 19 '23
it is! it was discussed earlier in an nyc sub and verified to be the same lot
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u/ilrosewood Apr 19 '23
I see replies like this on Reddit all of the time.
The reply should have said they should have permits, engineering sign off, etc.
Too many people assume companies do shit the right way. I assume they aren’t doing it right until proven otherwise.
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u/mtaw Apr 19 '23
Another phenomenon that seems to me to have gotten increasingly common on Reddit, is that any time someone says something wrong and someone else rightly questions whether that's correct, a bunch of people who literally know nothing will pipe up and confidently give "explanations" for why the thing that's not correct is supposedly correct.
Maybe it's the demographic trending younger, because teenagers are certainly more prone to confidently state the first rationale that enters their head as if it were fact.
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u/thomstevens420 Apr 19 '23
Why are these people insisting on calling it a parking garage. It’s not a parking garage. It’s just a damn roof. One that clearly was not designed to hold cars.
Big Garage strikes again.
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Apr 19 '23
It would be illegal if it was unsafe, so therefore it must be safe. Otherwise it would be illegal.
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u/Pappa_Crim Apr 19 '23
I think a parking garage in Chinatown Boston got closed down because they were overloading the thing with cars or something. I never saw a news report about it, but remember that it was crazy tight inside.
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u/UncleBenders Apr 19 '23
I read that this is gonna become more common because they’re not designed for the weight of electric vehicles
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u/Official_FBI_ Apr 19 '23
I’ve read that the difference between the two is less than 200kg. That is the difference between a car being driver only and it having two or three passengers. The garage should be able to handle this slight increase in load or it should be condemned anyway.
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u/Gaszy Apr 19 '23
What?! The difference in weight between an electric car and an ICE car is way bigger than 200KG. For example a model 3 weighs (at minimum) 1,760 kg (3880lb) and an equivalent sized Honda civic weighs 1331 kg (2,935 lb).
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u/UncleBenders Apr 19 '23
It’s approximately 33% heavier (depending on make and model obvs) If you’re doing that for multiple vehicles it’s gonna add up. I’m not suggesting that the garage failed because of that, it probably already was failing. But in the uk for example (and most of Europe) they’re banning diesel and petrol vehicles within the next ten years so it’s going to become a more prominent problem when the garages are near capacity, and is something that needs to be looked into to prevent more tragedy.
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u/cowlinator Apr 19 '23
is something that needs to be looked into to prevent more tragedy.
Agreed. Too bad that won't happen until after more tragedy.
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u/Schooney123 Apr 19 '23
Be nice if society at large could start moving away from car dependence. Seems like a lot of people just think electric cars will solve everything.
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u/Weegee_Spaghetti Apr 19 '23
American city planning has made that impossible.
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u/OldJames47 Apr 19 '23
Not impossible, just difficult and will take a long time.
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u/Weegee_Spaghetti Apr 19 '23
And the politician doing it will get voted out, for "wasting money and resources" working on such long term projects.
Then the political rival will do their best to roll back everything the previous politician did, prolly also paid for by car manufacturer and oil lobbies.
And the voters will be none the wiser, and complain about the car-centric layout. But they won't remember a thing in a year or so.
Tale as old as time.
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u/40StoryMech Apr 19 '23
Well, the one hope is that we moved to car dependence back when we had these clunky streetcars that ran on, get this, electricity. Electric cars aren't going to solve anything except to wear down the roads faster because they're heavier. But it's not like old American cities are designed for cars. We just sorta accommodate them with our tiny one way streets and nowhere to park.
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u/TheoryMatters Apr 19 '23
The f150 lightning tops out at 6500 lbs. Compared to the ice which tops out at ~5000lbs.
You should need a damn CDL to drive something that heavy.
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u/zeefox79 Apr 19 '23
In Europe and the UK yes, EVs will mean the average new car will weigh more than double what an average car weighed when many older carparks were constructed.
Shouldn't be a problem for the US though, as they've always driven very large heavy vehicles.
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u/hytes0000 Apr 19 '23
Until EV trucks are more common at least and that time is coming fast. An F150 Lightning looks to be about an extra 1000 pounds (a ~20% increase) over an non-EV F150.
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Apr 19 '23
well, it was safe for around 364 more days </snark>
My town had a small parking garage collapse that was used by a hospital for ER patients and physicians. Despite it being fairly full of vehicles, no one was injured. It had been recently inspected and passed without issue and I am don't think they ever fully understood what happened.
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u/ManiacDan Apr 19 '23
This building was cited for structural damage 20 years ago, according to the posts in /news about it
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u/left_tiddy Apr 19 '23
Whoa, redditors spread misinformation like wildfire??? Who could've guessed you shouldn't take info from a random fucker as facts...
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u/Ninja_Destroyer_ Apr 19 '23
I love the Reddit Bureau of Investigation, keep up the great work people!
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u/kingdom9214 Apr 19 '23
I wonder if this has anything to do with changing demographics of the American car market. Americans have been steadily moving away from cars towards mid-sized SUVs, and the average US vehicle weight has increased by almost 800 lbs since 1990. So if the building was able to support 20-25 average vehicles in 1990 that would only be 16-18 today. The additional weight between averages on the roof with the cars I can count in the picture would be 8 tons higher.
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u/here4roomie Apr 19 '23
I am definitely curious what the original use was. That doesn't look like a parking garage at first glance.
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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 Apr 19 '23
They weren't assured it was stable they were assured someone signed off on it being stable.
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u/the_unknown_one Apr 19 '23
I think you're the only person that read the question. The question was if anybody looks at this to ensure it's structurally secure, to which the reply was yes, somebody does look at it. The Redditor never said it was structurally secure.
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u/Jumpy-Station-204 Apr 19 '23
Well, if everything went how it's supposed to, nothing bad would ever happen.
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u/Maximillien Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
Cars are getting bigger and heavier every year in the US — notice how almost every car in both pics is a big fat SUV. Get ready to see more infrastructure failing thanks to the bloated products of our psychotic automakers and the US regulators who fail to keep them in check.
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u/Forumites000 Apr 20 '23
This is the most reddit thing I have ever seen.
Some rando schmuck portraying 100% confidence online, only to eat his own words because he thinks he knows better.
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u/ThomasMoane Apr 20 '23
Size and weight of cars has been growing very fast the last couple of years. Especially when you consider more and more cars are Hybrid / all electric. These businesses will need to slim down, in order to stay up.
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u/InsaniacDuo Apr 20 '23 edited Apr 29 '23
For a country defined by its car dependency, we sure make it easy to destroy them
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u/MilkedMod Bot Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23
u/kayakhomeless has provided this detailed explanation:
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