very sad…
http://abc7news.com/news/5-dead-8-injured-in-balcony-collapse-in-berkeley/787649/
It is so tragic! My D went to Berkeley for grad school and I can picture where this took place, and it is very close to the campus.
The apartment building was built in 2006, so there is no excuse. The balcony should have been designed to support a bunch of people, even if they were jumping up and down.
As structural engineers, I can’t tell you the number of times we hear people say, “Oh, we don’t need an engineer for this building! Nothing ever happens!” Builders will say, “Your drawings are overconservative. I’ve been building for 30 years and have never done it like that.” They seem to filter out incidents like this. We had a balcony collapse in Maine recently, too.
@MaineLonghorn , here is one person’s comment on the deck failure…makes sense to me, but I really have no clue if he is correct or not…but the photo gives some credence to him…
"I took a good look at the photo and the deck was completely rotted underneath. It looks like the balcony deck surface was improperly flashed and sealed allowing water to get trapped underneath. It’s going to rot pretty fast under those circumstances.
http://ww3.hdnux.com/photos/37/07/67/8158714/7/breaking_now.jpg
You can tell by the dark color of the wood and the kind of fluffy appearance. Good wood would be much lighter in color and have large jagged edges where it broke.
Flashing and sealing a deck requires a lot of attention to detail and is easy to screw up. On a building like this, where all of the decks were done by the same people, every deck in the building should be examined for signs of failure."
@gosmom, thanks for the link. That does make sense. It could be an architectural design flaw or a construction problem.
What a tragic story. Design or construction issues aside, 13 people on a small balcony is never a good idea.
Any tragedy like this is so incredibly sad, but when the victims are the same ages as your kids, for some reason it’s like an extra punch to the stomach.
Officials now reporting 6 dead…
One of my first jobs was for an architect whose deck fell off his own house! He’d designed it correctly but the contractor had put in the wrong size screws on the ledger board. He went away for a weekend leaving his teenage kids alone in the house and of course they had a party. Actually I learned two lessons from him - one architectural and the other parenting…
I can’t tell you how many decks I’ve seen that are improperly attached to the house. I’ve taken to making free standing decks. At least then all you have to worry about is whether they actually dug the foundations deep enough. I haven’t seen a deck that needed to be legalized yet with proper foundations. Not one. No one wants to dig down 42 inches.
Cantilevered decks are very hard to flash.