Only two steel connections apparently were used along the top of the decorative concrete panel that fell from the O'Donnell Park parking structure, crushing a 15-year-old on his way to Summerfest — not four, as called for in building designs.Not good.
In addition, investigators are exploring questions about whether the steel connections were of a different type than called for in the original blueprints for the county-owned structure and whether the steel itself was the strength specified.Also not good.
By the way, why would you need any 13-ton decorative concrete slabs on a building that was already made out of concrete slabs in the first place? (My bag was not civil but industrial construction — refineries, manufacturing plants, pipelines — where form really does follow function. The 13-ton decorative slabs' trucking cost alone would make a project manager soil himself. And you'd have to hire special equipment to transport just two of those suckers at a time. ...)
[Contract change orders] occur often on construction projects and are supposed to be carefully documented.Yup. But maintenance contracts, maybe not so much.
eta: A JSOnline reader comment, very troubling if true.
2 comments:
As I just pointed out at JSOnline:
Walker has been trying to sell the park and the structure for years, which is why they did not invest a lot of dollars into the maintenance of it. Now that the poor child lost his life, Walker is not going to waste a good crisis to try to unload the property. Then we can have a McDonald's across for the Calatrava.
My concern is whether there is any way to verify any of the information now that they've removed both the fallen facade and the wall it fell from and hid them from the public.
The DA, who is not part of any coverup conspiracy, says the pieces are being handled as evidence.
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