I live in a small town where we don’t have 37-story buildings. So when I read about this, my first thought is just: holy shit, twenty-one floors started buckling because somebody cheapened the goddamn steel.
You call it ‘solving the housing crisis.’ You gutted a Pfizer office, you cram 19 new floors on a 10-story building, and you call it 1,600 apartments for a city that needs them. Fine. The promise sounded fine. But the union guy — Steamfitters Local 638, Cliff Jensen, on the record — is saying what actually happened: not enough steel to support what they were building. The building started to fall at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday while people were inside it. Workers had to self-evacuate because the contractors couldn’t be trusted to keep the goddamn building standing.
The city had already fined these same developers seven times between July and December last year. Seven. Over $32,000 in fines. The Department of Buildings filed a complaint on the same day the building started to buckle, saying they were excavating beyond what was approved. The inspectors knew. The fines didn’t slow them down. The building started to come down while workers were on the 21st and 22nd floors.
You sold a housing crisis and delivered a death trap. You let the same crew keep building because somebody in this town was getting paid, and the people who were actually going to live in those 1,600 units were going to find out whether the building stayed up by moving in. The workers on the job found out first because they’re always the ones who find out first. They always are.
If you can’t build a building that stays up, you don’t get to call it housing. If you need 19 floors of leverage on 10 floors of foundation, you build it right or you don’t build it. The fine was $32,000. The collapse would have been somebody’s kid. Eat shit. You knew exactly what you were doing.
Source story: the source story.