Engineering expert weighs in on deadly NYC building collapse

In the meantime, on the phone with us right now is Professor Anil Kumar Agrawal. He's the chair and professor of the civil engineering department at CUNY. Professor, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can hear you. All right. First of all, thank you very much for joining us for this breaking news. And again, they have been working at this scene now for about three hours. So at this point, as a civil engineer, what does it look like or what does it seem like happened here in this situation, as far as your expertise tells you? Well, I have seen some limited picture or whatever information is there. But what I see is. A masonry building, which is, you know, the brick masonry building, they are generally very weak. And then you have this, the construction site where you have this big hole in the ground right next to the building. And what happens is, you know, if the soil on the side of the hole, on the wall of the hole, it gets destabilized or moves even by an inch or two inch or a small movement. That can trigger the foundation stability problem in the building, the wooden building, cascading to the masonry building. And, you know, this one particular thing with the masonry building is that they are not strong. You know, they are under compression because of gravity load. But when there's a foundation movement, the wall basically can just buckle out of the plane, just collapse. Without any notice, you don't need a lot of movement there.