Doomed to Fail - Ep 72 - Shopping for Disaster - The Sampoong Department Store Collapse

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

We're back with Engineering Disasters - this time, we're going to South Korea in 1995 for one of the most horrible disasters on record. The Sampoong Department Store was never meant to be a store - it was built as an apartment building and converted into a store. Developer Lee Joon ignored all the warning signs and made bad decisions after bad decisions - resulting in a collapse that killed over 500 people.It's a classic 'Swiss Cheese' model - little things that add up to a huge disaster.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Do you ever at work when Alex and I used to try to figure out how to open bottles of wine if we didn't have a wine opener? And we were like doing the thing where you would like put it in a shoe and then try to bang the shoe against the thing. Like one time I like came back to the office because we would always like find bottles and wind around the office. And I came back and there was like just cork everywhere because he had like scraped it out with scissors. Just trying so desperately to open it.

I've done it. I definitely don't like a screw with like a hammer situation before. Oh, okay. That makes sense. With like the back on the hammer and like it. Yeah, yeah. You just like screw it, locks in. They pull up.

People have no context on what we're talking about. they all agree welcome welcome to dune to fail we're joining you on a sunny wednesday afternoon or wherever you are i'm far as joined here by taylor we are having some drinks i'm drinking out of a child sippy cup that i acquired from an adult establishment it is not a child sippy cup it's not a strip club either i don't know why i said it that way it's just a restaurant that gives you little pink cups that's so funny This is a nice sippy cup from a strip club. It's a lot going on.

Also, you'll notice that I'm hitting a bait pen because it makes me look young and cool. I was thinking how cool you look. Oh, my gosh. Okay, let me tell you this story. Speaking of cool people. I was at the airport the other day. And because we went to North Carolina. And we're in the airport in Las Vegas.

And there was this couple who was so good looking. It was like, good looking man, good looking woman. And they were wearing, well, we had no luggage, no purses. no bags. They just had the nicest sweatsuits I've ever seen with these, like, big cargo pockets, but they were like black and like thick sweatsuits. And they were so nice. And then they were walking. And the girl was holding two iPhones. He was holding one. And then she like went into her pocket and she dropped a vape pen. And they like, she picked it up and put a bag of pocket. So she had two phones and a vape pen. And then she went into another pocket and pulled out the biggest

watt of cash I've ever seen in my life. It was just like counting cash. I was like, who are you guys what is going on you're so cool what is this you don't need anything on the plane except all your cash and your vapid can you remember them on the plane why you look so cool what's happening i felt very not cool because they were so cool i think you were i think you might have come across me and rachel no they were cool than that they were cooler than you even than you know you can believe it but look at this look how cute this is it is it is cute okay so what happened taylor i'll tell you this right so eight months ago whatever it was i went to ireland and i was with jeff dun and done and done babes and so we went to some bar

in dublin and we're walking out they had a vending machine and the vending machine had elf bars like a little bait pen elf bars in there and don't was like oh my god they have elf bars and so he went to the setting machine hated like whatever it was and it spit out an elf bar it's this it's this it's like this oh okay it's there like the rectangle ish one yeah the little rectangle bait pen things and somehow whatever like we go to the wedding and then he's going off with his wife somewhere i'm like i'm gonna go peel off into my own thing somehow i ended up with the elf bar and i went to dublin i was there for a couple of days and i noticed i started like when i would spit in the sink it would be pink and i was like oh my god my fucking mouth is bleeding i

remember you talking about that right yes and and it freaked me out and i was like it has to be the bait then and so i stopped but whatever for every reason i packed the damn thing somehow it ended up underneath my bed at home and like three weeks ago rachel's like moving the bed and trying to it and she finds a vape pen and the thing i started hitting it i was like oh yeah i forgot this is kind of fun and then it ran out and then two days ago i went out bought this my first bait pen i ever bought on my own this one right here are you are your gums pleading again no my gums i just started doing it so give me like a week and then we'll find out it's going to start pleading um but so what's in it i don't know i don't

don't know but i don't think it's good for me no probably not like nothing you can inhale this much this easily can be good for you but it makes it look young and it makes it look cool i mean smoking makes you look so cool so like yeah no 100 percent you look cool over you're smoking everyone yes everyone kids pick up a cigarette dude if i saw a kid smoking i'd be like I'd be worried it's bad but I would be like shit it's like somebody get this kid a fucking leather jacket and Harley Davidson what are we doing so we are on to the far's side of our story time and I have a whole fun little thing I'm going to talk about that I kind of touched on the last episode so I'm exciting okay should you give me hints do you guess it oh um

Do you have anything? So I do have a signature drink. So the drink that I'm going to be drinking is something called sujuwangua, sujian gua. Sujian gua. It is a Korean holiday drink that is non-alcoholic, and it is basically kind of like a punch, but it's like cinnamon and it's sweet, and it looks like very fun and sugary. Hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. It's going to give you any clues. But I thought it's a holiday season. A lot of people are going to be in department stores. It's going to be in like malls, things of that nature. And so that's, I'm kind of like being seasonal and touching on that. And I can tell you that this event took place in South Korea. That's all you know.

All right. So I'm back on engineering disasters. Is this number two? This is like number four. Okay. We need to talk about that exactly what constitutes as the first four. Bhopal. Okay.

Kansas City. Oh, right. And roller coasters. Yes. Okay. Yes. So I did notice, like I mentioned yesterday, that after the roller coaster episode, we had like the most downloads on that episode in like a month.

And then the Napoleon one did like a tiny amount more downloads than that one did. And I was like, oh, so like, folks are pretty into this stuff. I went further back and realized the last spike we had after Napoleon was Kansas City, the Kansas City Hyatt collapse. So I'm starting to guess that folks are really into like engineering disasters, which is really fun because I actually love the topic. And like, I love true crime and like all that.

But like, and most of it is like psychological, right? It's like getting into the heads of like, you know, when you think about like kidnapping, and raping like another person like telling them like what like you know how do you get to that point in your life right that's kind of a fascinating part of true crime for me with engineering it's a little bit scarier in some ways because it's like it's like somebody did a thing or didn't do a thing and then 10 15 20 30 years later you can be going about your happy life doing whatever it is you do and then holy shit the floor crumbles underneath you and you fucking die it's like you know what it's scarier it's scarier and you know what that

once in a while in New York City like a manhole explodes right and I'm always like Jesus fucking Christ I walked over so many manholes and like someday they're gonna fucking explode yeah but like that shit happens all time so there's another situation I read about where like these two guys got into a fight one of them like kicked the other guy the guy fell down and then somehow some way a fucking sinkhole develops underneath him and the guy just falls 800 feet into it's like what the fuck it's so scary it's like it's like imagine so i'm sitting here right now and then like 50 years ago someone did something 30 yards that way and then it caused the hill that i'm on to fucking collapse as i'm sitting on like it's terrifying so i actually love

researching engineering disasters i'm kind of getting a sense that y'all like to hear about them so i might just keep going with this topic but we'll see tvd like i mentioned in the beginning. It is a holiday season. People are going to be in stores. I wanted to do something they kind of touched on that. So that's what I'm going to be doing. Today, I'm going to be touching on a store that existed in the bustling, lovely, stunning city of Seoul, South Korea. You'll notice I use the past tense existed because the store no longer exists. If you want to avoid a disaster and department store this holiday season, stay tuned for our sponsor. of Doom to Fail is brought to you by Naughty Studio. Are you looking for some holiday

merch for a friend's gift exchange? A fun gift for a sibling secret Santa? Check out the collection of inappropriate holiday sweaters and gifts from Naughty Studio. We definitely don't recommend them for a work party, but we do recommend them for a family party where you'd like to make someone uncomfortable and also take a few minutes to yell about free speech because this is America. Find Naughty Studio, that's N-A-U-T-E-E-S studio on Instagram and Etsy use a promo code let's do this for 15% off your order that's not tea studio we'll put the link in our show notes and happy holidays from us thanks and the name of the store is the sam pung department store okay so i'm going to do this in three acts we're going to go into the

background the accident itself and then how it happened okay so act one the background we're We're going to start with Seoul itself. So Seoul's history is fucking insane. Like what a haunted tortured city. Like this thing has been shelled into oblivion by like every country in and around the Korean Peninsula. At one point, it was actually taken over 100% by North Korea and then artilleryed into non-existence

until it was taken back. There's a lot going on there. But long story short, is that it is, so South Korea, it's on the Korean Peninsula. the southern part of it is south korea the northern part of it that touches china is north korea and soles sits on the northwesternest or sorry yeah yeah is that right yeah it's the northwesternest part of the korean peninsula so it's very very close to north korea it's actually only 30 miles it is 30 miles from soul to demilitarized zone and by the way it's the most bust

one of the most bustling cities ever it is the fourth um largest city by population of any metropolitan area it's fucking huge and it's gorgeous like if you look at pictures of it i was like this is la like the downtown there's a picture of downtown l.a with the mountains behind it and you're like wow this looks absolutely stunning there's tons of those in north korea or south korea and soul like it is a beautiful bustling lively active city um with a ton of history behind it there's a picture i saw that i i think people have seen before that's really stunning but it like shows you what kind of a country south korea is it's at night it was taken by the international space station and it shows south korea and china at night from space and you're like there's an ocean between them you like

there isn't that's north korea it is just like a dead zone is so sad i mean it's sad like i mean it's really fucking sad like it when you when you look at like what soul looks like and what Korea in general looks like you know like holy shit like these people are like the hardest working most industrious smartest most like it's just like and they're like you look 30 miles above it you're like what the fuck happened it's just it is it's crazy to me that i mean i think we talked about this before but like something's happening in north korea we don't know and the people there don't know and like i watched this one documentary where a doctor because like doctors from the rest of the world will go there and try to help people

and there was one that did like cataract surgery and like made a whole much people be able to see again it's like a very simple surgery that like they can do everywhere else in the world they would do it and these people would do it and they'd be able to see again and they would go run up to a picture of the leader and be like thank you supreme leader for this blessing and being able to do this and you're like he's you could have just had this if you're anywhere else so well yeah so but like that's kind of a backdrop on what this event is that we're going to be talking about it's that you have a country like south korea where it has been a fucking war it was japanese occupied then it went through the korean war it was

fucking shelled was battered into an existence it rebuilt itself some of your volcano conversation where in the 60s and 70s basically like developments started ramping fairly significantly because the banking 50s was the korean war that's when basically there was no south korea or there was no soul and then all of a sudden they come out of that and then they started doing economic revitalization rapidly building and expanding the city in 1988 Seoul was a war to the Olympic Games and in the lead up to this there was a massive fucking expansion and blow-up of construction because A there was nothing there after the war and so they started building because of the war but beyond that the Olympics obviously caused them to

exceed even their standard goals of building so that's kind of the backdrop that the story falls into is you have a country that is basically pushed to the very limits in terms of capacity to build with an absolute need to build and where that happens shit goes wrong it seems like so in 1987 there was a company called the sampool group who decided to build in a apartment complex in the Gangnam region of Seoul. It's predominantly known as being one of the wealthiest parts of the country. It has been likened to Beverly Hills and things of that nature. So for example, Samsung's headquarters is based in the Gangnam region. Hyundai's headquarters are based in the Gangnam region. And then all the other now massive conglomerates that supply

those companies is also headquartered there so that's what we're talking about uh at the time the sampoon group they owned what was um previously a landfill essentially in that area and what they thought was let's capitalize on the increased property values we'll build an apartment building in this area make a show a lot of money there's not any of any affordable housing here anyways so whatever so they retained this firm called wussang construction to build it like so typical like reminds you every startup i've ever been at so halfway through the construction project a new chairman of this group was installed this guy's name was lee june and i'm going to be talking about him quite a bit later on and this is the part that's like very typical it's like

when a new leader comes in and they fucking don't know shit but they feel like they know shit and they start making changes and flip like just stetching stuff out it's just like leave it alone man like you it's the worst it's so common it's always awful you're like he's like oh i know all these things and you're like we've been doing this for like 10 years like can you just listen to us and they're like no i know all these things like leave me the fuck like it's so typical it's so this guy comes in this building that they contracted with wussung had already been half built and he decided again no context no background instruction or anything he decides fuck it I don't want an apartment building.

I want a department store. I have a question for you, Fars. Yes. If I'm moving into a new building, is there a way to see who built it if they are qualified? I mean, you probably have to go to the city because there's permits that were filed. That's probably your only option. An alert that's like, this building was built by a guy who just wanted to build a big building. Should we like start a startup that like just makes it easy to pull permits?

yes if you go to an elevator and it says like go to the front desk for the elevator thing and I'm like fuck you I know it's not there yeah that guy's not going to know fucking like larry hanging out vaping working cool yeah no so so this guy decides halfway through the project we're going to build a department building fucking this department idea it's not going to work so But doing that means installing one additional floor, installing elevators, and most importantly, cutting into major support columns so that they can increase the retail space inside this building. Can you tell you something else? Yes. I'm going to run for every single five seconds because I have a lot to say about this.

So when I was in college, I lived in a dorm that was like a 30-story building. It's out of its apartments. I lived on the ninth floor, but all of the rooms had weird, like, beams that kind of would go through the wall. So it can't be like a shelf on your wall, like a beam that came out and like across it, because it used to be an office building and was an office building, it was fine. When it turned into apartments, it swayed too much for apartments because the office building sway so they don't fall over, but it was too much sway for apartments.

In the middle of the night, you'd be like, no, no, so they had to add more support. That's actually going to come up here in a minute. So yes, please do stop me and reject. So the idea was that with an apartment building, you can basically install support structures almost anywhere you want. Because, look, I'm in a room right now. You're in a room, we're all in a room.

Like, you could put a support beam over there. I wanna fucking know. You put it over there, there, like you're surrounded by walls. And you can hide supporting structures within walls. That's different in, a retail space or a warehouse because it depends it is the function depends on the ability to access wide open spaces you can't just stack them with support beams so that's a key difference in the architecture of a apartment building a hotel whatever and a warehouse so on and so forth so knowing knowing that this guy lee wanted to change the structure of this half built building halfway through who sung the firm they hired to do the building they bowed out they said they're

uncomfortable the changes i'm not going to do this and they were like they pay whatever fines they had to pay for bowing out of the contract or breaking their contract and lee june the chairman that was recently assaulted fuck it there was also a construction business as part of sampool group and he was like we'll just reutilize our own firm which again he just took over his chairman to finish this project. So picture wise, it looks like any other big box, big big box store. It's painted bright pink for some reason,

so it looks a little bit weird and like off-putting. The key is that there is a north and south wing and those seem like pretty critical structural components to the building. And then there's a middle section and that's kind of like the shopping area. Like the way I would, it's weird, When I first saw it, I was like, this looks like Caesar's Palace.

Like it looks like the old original Caesar's Palace where it's like it has these tall towers. Then like the units are kind of in between. That's kind of the setup of it. So typically in buildings like this, the construction, the construction type is to use a steel skeletal structure. It's how every retail space operates. It's how every retail space is how every warehouse and it's how every skyscraper is built. steel can flex it can move and that is critical when you're dealing with a shitlet of weight and a ton of levels above you in this case Lee June's construction firm decided to use what's called

a flat slab construction which means a slab of concrete that makes of the floors and then there's support columns in between them and they're usually spaced out in this case about 36 feet apart from each other so a ton of little things in between but what that essentially also means is that the top floor was responsible for supporting its weight but the floor below was responsible for supporting its weight plus the top floor the one below that supported all three and so on and so forth makes sense like this reminds me of the kansas city collapse because it's like you're counting on the thing above you to like do more work than it should do or whatever you know the amount of not have worked that this thing was designed to do it would have done if it was constructed the

way it was designed to do that's not what happened so the building was completed and opened the public in july 7th of 1990 so the events we're going to discuss happened five years after the building was built so the building stood for five years so let's go into the accident itself so So in April of 1995, the first signs kind of started arising when employees started noticing cracks on the fifth floor, which is the top floor. The thing was built in the, sorry, the thing was designed to be four floors tall. They decided later, again, halfway through construction, they're going to add a fifth floor. And the fifth floor would be a food court.

And it's on this floor that they started noticing cracks and buckling happening on the floor that connects the slab to the columns. It's also worth noting that the air condition unit for the entire building was on top of the fifth floor sitting on top of the roof. So a month later in June, the number of cracks increase in this area on the fifth floor to the point where the management closed the top floor down and they brought in a civil engineering firm to inspect. And the civil engineering firm was basically very simply, yeah, not good. This thing's going to collapse. That sounds very smart. Yeah.

Bringing an engineers and have them tell you what you do. It's like I can barely color between lines on a coloring book and I could tell you this building is going to collapse. It's basically how the engineers framed it. So the store's leadership called an emergency meeting and they were trying to figure out what to do. And everyone was of the opinion of, hey, we should have back through this building and hire a firm to come in and try and fix this up.

that's the only thing to do. And Lee was the boss and he goes, no, I'm not going to close a billing down because if we do that, we're going to lose tons of revenue for sales that day. And I'm like, later on, I was like, what on earth could his logic have been? Are we just going to keep this open in perpetuity knowing full well we're like this thing is going to collapse? Like I don't understand what his thought process was. He sounds like a guy who probably shouldn't have been in leadership. On June 29th at 5.52 p.m., the building started producing a cracking sound, and store employees, against the wishes of management, sounded an alarm and instructed everybody to get the fuck out of the building. Fuck, yeah. Good job. That's, don't worry about your job. So you're like, don't worry about your job. Say, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's like the 9-11 thing. Do you say that people were like, I'm going to listen to my boss. My boss is somebody to go upstairs. And, like,

100% because you get you and I feel like I would have done the same thing you'd be like worried you know what's happening you look to this boss who has no idea like your boss at your hedge fund or at your like macy's isn't a civil engineer you know like yeah well so here's the problem the problem is that with a structural issue like this it has a compounding domino effect every failure compounds the next failure two times so by the time you can noticed something going on, it is booked. Like there is no coming back. So at this point, it was way too late. What ended up happening was the air conditioning unit on the top floor, which is the fifth floor. It caved into the fifth floor, which then caved into the fourth, the third, so on, all the way down to two sub-basements.

Oh, my God. Around 2,000 people were inside when this happened. except for Lee, the chairman, who like evacuated himself, but left his, like, he left his son-in-law inside. Oh, well, it says a lot about high filter by son-in-law. Yeah, exactly. And so he managed to evacuate, but in total, of the 2,000 people that were inside the building, 502 people were basically killed instantly. And then 1,500 were trapped in the rubble. And if you look a picture of this what you'll see is a north and south wing like i mentioned earlier they're still standing and the entire center is completely caved in so that it's good that it didn't collapse

but it kind of fucked over the rescue the fact that those two didn't collapse because the city was like these two towers that are not meant to stand on their own are now standing here we can't send people into this thing because they're going to they're going to collapse on top of them because these things sometimes like they don't all collapse it's like part of it collapses you know so there's like that line where you could be like standing there and be like oh my god yeah just in front of me there's nothing all of a sudden like open a door and there's nothing all of a sudden that was also a horror movie what was that horror movie where like it was a day after tomorrow or something no i don't remember it happened in san andreas i remember yes yes they're at that restaurant in la and they open the door and then there's nothing there's nothing there Thank you, Taylor. You were, see, just where we're friends. I've already told you that my mom says that she's watched San Andreas a bunch because she really likes it. And I was like, that's crazy. And also good for you. Yeah, great for her. That's a fucking awesome movie.

So long story short, was that basically this rescue operation held still. It didn't move at all because what they were trying to do was tie these guide wires to the structure that was still standing so they could retain it in place. so it did a collapse onto rescuers so that's what they did and once they achieved that basically rescuers went in and out of the 1500 people that were assumed stuck inside about 150 people were dragged out still alive except obviously really really badly wounded i did read that they ended up rescuing one person who managed to 5 or 17 days uh one yeah insane 17 days days so one thing that's crazy that is like another direct parallel to the kansas city thing was that after this thing collapsed obviously all water and sewer lines are collapsed in as well and so people who were alive mentioned that like yeah there was a lot of people around me and they

all just fucking drowned because they're all pinned underneath concrete blocks and the water's rising because this thing's getting flooded and they just drowned kind of crazy yeah so two weeks is where they're like anybody that's inside this thing is probably dead obviously one person wasn't probably more but like one person for sure wasn't they rescued that person and so they decided after that this period of time we're going to convert this into a rescue operation so they ended up doing that and then clearing out the space obviously nobody was happy with lee lee was kind of a pig and shit in this situation and he was dragged in the court and it was like one thing that was like incredible was he kept talking about like how much this disaster impacted him

financially. People are like, there's like, you killed like a small village worth of people with your neglect. Oh, my God. And so he ended up getting 10 and a half years in prison. His son, Lee's son, was also the CEO of the store itself, that entity that the soon point department store. Did his son-in-law die? His son-law did die. Yeah. Yeah. He got his son out, though. Yeah. Uh-huh. He got the CEO out. It's very suspicious. And so his son ended up getting seven years in prison. It's great to know that Lee got out of jail and was like maybe alive for like two years before he died. Like he, that's like all he's known for is like being responsible for this.

There was a city administrator who was responsible for certifying the safety of the building who accepted a bribe from Lee. He ended up getting three years in prison for bribery. Three years. Should be more. It should be forever. It should be fucking forever. Unbelievable. And then the families themselves end up getting about $360,000 each.

That came out of the budget from the city of Seoul itself, as well as Lee's and his family's personal wealth. So, yeah. And today, what stands on top of this haunted fucking landscape is a luxury apartment building, which is a career. horrific to think about oh no there's lots of ghosts in that building so act three is what ended up happening so the design of the building was so the design building was fine what they did with that design was all bad so okay like i said the application of this building was never meant to hold a wide

open space it was meant to be an apartment and what was clear is that what ended up happening to this building is what is referred to as a punching shear. So what this is essentially when the, okay, so you look at a floor. I'm holding my hands up and this is from the benefit of nobody that's actually listening. So you have a floor, and then you have poles that or whatever, you have like columns that run through the center of it, right?

And the idea is that like the columns are holding the weight of that floor. Eventually, there can be a situation where, where the pressure, weight, and force on that concrete slab is enough to punch through the column underneath it. So that's what ended up happening here, but why would something like this happened? So again, they basically did everything wrong and on the cheap side in the interest of what Lee wanted to do from an economic perspective. So for one, the columns that supported the fours legally were supposed to be 31 inches thick. The thicker they are, the more weight they can bear,

all that. In this case, they were reduced to 24 inches thick. And the reason was to increase floor space for retail sales. The other problem was there was a misalignment of the columns on a four to four level. So basically what it means is that you don't have one column that goes all the way to the top. You have a column that goes up two floors, then it breaks, and then there's another column in 404 to 5, so on and so forth, which means that you can't count on the columns underneath you to help support your weight because they're not there. The other thing is the slabs that the fours were made of themselves.

So we heard a lot about this during the Titan submersible disaster, which was like the thing, that was made out of carbon fiber. Everybody kept talking about how carbon fiber is incredibly strong under tensile strength or um yeah it's incredibly strong under tensile strength but under compression it's weak that's what happens with concrete like obviously you can't bend a piece of concrete like you you only break a piece of concrete you can't bend right right it's not like a yes yeah and so what we do what engineers do is they insert rebar which is steel reinforced barbing into concrete so that it gives it the tensile flexibility so it can flex a little bit without breaking.

That's the idea of rebar. In this case, each slab was supposed to hold 16 pieces of rebar, and it didn't. Each slab held half that. It held eight pieces of rebark. So that was not good either, which means that it didn't have enough of the tensile strength to not break under any weight. pressure force or what have you the last issue was wait so basically the building was never designed with a fifth floor the guy decided to add a fifth four because he wanted a restaurant on top of his building and so he added a

restaurant and on top of that restaurant he added what was or not on top of it but in the in the the flooring of that restaurant he inserted this hosing like this copper hosing that circulates water the reason was that in at this at least of this time I don't know if it's so common but in South Korea the custom is you eat on the floor like you sit on the floor you sit down you eat there and he wanted the floor to be warm so people feel comfortable so now you have all the weight of the so they increase the thickness of the concrete on the fifth four that was never designed to exist and they started running tubing through it along with water

so they increased the weight dramatically the other things thing was the air conditioning. So it's called a 15 ton unit, which apparently isn't the actual weight of the unit itself. The actual weight of the unit itself was 50 tons. I think that has to do with the capacity it has. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever it is. So this was installed on the roof. What was problematic about what they did here. So first off, it was obvious that when this thing kicked on, it was causing issues anyways. Like it was like it was weight. It was the source of a lot of the fractures of the column on the fifth floor but the bigger problem was everybody complained about it the neighbors complained about this thing and so the management instead of doing

what you should have done which is airlift or crane this thing into a new spot they rolled it across the ceiling which applied the maximum weight across all the other columns causing one of them to crack severely is that what started it like officially officially would they think started it is it every single time this was like a known thing with the store employees was when they kick sort of this thing anytime i turned on you know because every time an air conditioning units starts on it like does a thing they noticed that like there was like a three and a half inch gap that was forming in the columns around the air conditioning unit so their suspicion was when this thing turns on it is quaking this entire building and so that is the assumption the

The assumption is this thing kicked on and it already shattered and fractured these columns to the extent that they were no longer supportive. And so they caved, so the air conditioning caved, and all of a sudden you have 50 tons hitting the floor of velocity and it just started panicking everything all the way down. So that was basically how it all ended up coming down. Like I said, ultimately, everybody went to jail. what's funny is they said that the building if it had been built as designed would have been two and a half times stronger than it needed to be to basically stand all the other little changes they did so for example to install elevators or escalators not elevators to install escalators they had to cut into the support supporting structures in the middle of the building like all the stuff they did at the end interest in making a retail space ultimately is what caused it to pancake on the ground this

sad so yeah have fun shopping do you think that people who like do those original plans add on all those things to make it so much stronger because they know people are going to fuck it up i don't know i think i think everything's just looking after their own ass like one thing that we learned from the higher the regency hiate disaster is that you in these situations you know in a lot of situations here like taylor with our jobs like if we fuck up a company might lose some money right somebody might get fired like who gives a fuck these guys have a different level of like liability like they are criminally liable i mean this guy the son was held um went to jail for criminal homicide or netting homicide whatever

was like like it is a different standard and so my assumption is that they overbuilt these things they're like I so don't want to get sodomized in a prison like you know what I mean like that's probably like what they're mostly thinking that's what I'll be thinking no totally and that but and I think and then also they have the assumption that like someone's going to mess it up or that yeah that too but in this case so the um builder in this case said fuck it I'm not going to build this to your spec I'll build to the spec that it was designed but I'm not going to build it to your new spec so Wusung was the original builder they're like fuck this this guy's going he's trying to tell me to like cut his like

architectural supports dude the fact of this thing stood for five years is incredible like so yeah it was it was uh it was all bad it was all bad it was really sad it's actually the second biggest not or sorry the second biggest accidental collapse of a building in world history uh there's one more that's bigger and that is in Bangladesh but info on it was like it's Bangladesh so it's kind of hard to come by but um i'm try and dig deeper into that one and some later date so uh these are so scary i love them yeah because because you're not doing anything wrong yeah you're just like as a store you're like whatever or like you have your job at the macy's and like you're just whatever and they're

like something's weird but you don't say anything because you don't you just trust that where you are is safe yeah um so so last night for reasons that I they're probably stupid we ended up deciding that we're going to go out on 6th Street and i fucking hate going on 6th Street because i'm nearly 40 years old i'm not 21 and it's just full of like 20 year olds that are shit-fuck wasted and doing stupid things and we go whatever it was a good time it was whatever and we came home and then i remember thinking myself i was like this is like outside of my risk profile like i'm not someone that's like i'm going to go out drinking on a a busy street with a bunch of college.

It's just like so many things can go wrong. I mean, you're dealing with like 22 year olds or trying to get laid and meet people. Like, you know, it's just like, this is not my seat. What's funny is not funny, but like about an hour and a half after I left, there was a shooting a block from where I was. This weekend? Yeah.

So all the fucking time in Austin. So somebody was like waving a gun around or doing something. Cops showed up, shot the person in the head. And then somehow, either through the victim or the guy who started the, whatever, somebody ended up shooting three people on accident. What accident? What did it mean? I think I mean, like, it might have been the cops. Might have been the cops who accidentally fired into a crowd. What?

You don't accidentally fire into a crowd? I mean, it's 6th Street, so it's pretty busy. But yeah, so like, so, but like it made me think I was like, I was like, that's a situation where like I knew I was taking. taking on a new risk profile but if you if you were like far as um we should get something for our parents let's go to the store i'd be like there's no risk like what the fuck could possibly go wrong well i mean like remember the other day when we were at the biltmore and we were going to that winery and we heard gunshots oh yeah that was fun and you were like what if i just got shot on the head right now and i was like i'd be like jacky kennedy because i would get your brains in my hand

but also that's very serious like someone could have been shooting us from the parking lot because man that's crazy austin that's scary so wild yeah it was like an hour after we left was a fucking shooting it was literally a block away like we were like at the bar there was a block away and i was like wow all right well that's life then but like that's the part of the engineering stuff that freaks me out it's like it's like there's no risk there should be no risk yeah it's like what can you do like if i go to my local grocery store and the fucking roof collapses on me while i'm trying to buy some pimento cheese which i love pimento cheese like if I was trying to buy tomato cheese yeah delicious um yeah gosh that's crazy so we learn about

punching shears we learned about weight loads we learned that vaping makes you look cool and young i look 16 again um so yeah it's just where we're we're gonna leave it that's terrible but super interesting i hadn't heard about that yeah it's a it's a gross uh off but also interesting one man i want to go to soul so bad it looks fucking incredible it looks like what an awesome like culture and people the whole thing is like amazing yeah it looks cool so um sweet let's know if you've been there yeah thank you thank you hey also let us know if like you like you like the engineering stuff because like yeah what do you want here i like i get burned out on like the true crime stuff because it's like i can only talk about someone

fucking a dead corpse so many times in my life eventually i want to move on to like other things and like the engineering stuff is like really interesting as you learn about like how things kind of come together and like the science behind it and like i don't know it's there's a lot of fun stuff there so if you like it let us down how they let us go taylor doom to fell pod at gmail.com and that all the social is doomed to fillpod pod we'll see there tell your friends tell your friends tell your families write to us tell us what you think. Awesome. Thank you, Taylor. I'm going to close it out. And