Engineer discusses deadly Brooklyn building collapse

Showing the moments of building collapsed in New York City. The footage from this ring camera shows the floor cave in, a cloud of dust as the building crumbles down. Eight people were killed, including two children. This happened as construction workers were digging at an adjacent lot. Now the mayor of New York City is ordering inspections at about 100 building sites involving companies related to the project. Thank you. And the investigation into how the collapse happened is just getting started. Joining us now to give us some insight on this is Ed Huff. He's a structural engineer at Huff Construction and Consulting in Deltona. All right, so thank you for your time, first of all, and for staying up late. I don't know, maybe you're normally a night owl. Maybe you're normally awake at 1130. But if not, thanks for taking some time to join us here, Ed. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. I have three kids, so I'm up normally during the night. Sleep is a premium, right? All right, so explain to us from your engineer's standpoint what you believe may have happened there in Brooklyn. Well, what I think happened, being that the collapsed building was right next to the construction site, I think something happened And with the foundation, either... Either the foundation was undermined from the construction activities that were happening next door or something with compaction equipment, heavy vibrations compacting the soil or some kind of combination of the two. Or another thing that came to mind, like in big cities, because I'm originally from Chicago, you could probably hear it in my accent. extent. And same with cities like New York, you got sandy soils that are by the, because they're by the, New York's by the ocean, Chicago by Lake Michigan. So, you know, heavy rains can wash away, you know, sandy soils out from underneath foundations. So it could have been a number of things or, you know, a combination of those three that come to mind. You know, but the line of thought that this could be related to the work that was going on at the next door, the adjacent building. Do you think if that's the case that the workers were aware of any shifting in the structure or any compromised bracing before the building collapsed? I mean, they could have, I mean, perhaps, you know, one of the subordinates, maybe they saw something, you know, and I'm just, I'm just speaking, you know, without knowing the, you know, all the facts with the investigation, but it's possible one of the subordinates, they said, hey, you know, this doesn't look right. Let's take care of this. Maybe one of the superiors said, no, it's fine, let's keep going, and it ended in catastrophe. Yeah, and of course, at this point, it's all kind of hypothetical, but you mentioned the soil, the sand, sandy soil earlier. Do you see any similarities in this collapse in Brooklyn and the Surfside condo collapse that was so awful here in Florida in 2021? I mean, similarities, I mean, you know, loss of life, catastrophes, you know, tragedies, for sure, you know, similarities there. The failure mode, no, I mean, the failure mode at the Surfside condo was a structural connection where the column, the structural column and the floor, the rebar connection there, failed. This, I think, It was more of a foundation-giving way. So I don't think they're similar at all. I see. Okay. Well, Ed, thank you so much for your insight. And again, with the investigation in the early stages, certainly we'll hear more, get more answers on that collapse there in Brooklyn in the days to come. Ed Huth with Huth Structural Engineering there in Deltona. Thank you for your time.