Living with Hazards, Dealing with Disasters by Waugh William L

Author:Waugh, William L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317465973
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

STRUCTURAL FAILURES

Structural failures are somewhat unusual events in the United States. Building collapses occur in older urban areas, such as New York City, but they are usually associated with fires and other factors that weaken supports for roofs, walls, and floors. Collapses also occur during earthquakes, landslides, and other disasters. Despite the relative infrequency of building collapses and other structural failures, concerns have been raised by professional associations, such as the American Institute of Architects (AIA), about the increasing pressure to build quickly and cheaply using exotic materials and designs. There have been some failures of long-span designs, in particular, that have resulted in deaths ands injuries of construction workers during the building of structures and users after structures have been put into use (Waugh 1990; Waugh and Hy 1996).

CASE 4-1  The Winecoff Hotel Fire of 1946

The Atlanta fire that is perhaps more remembered than all but the 1865 conflagration immortalized in Gone With the Wind involved a hotel. On December 7, 1946, in the middle of the night, a fire broke out on the third floor of the fifteen-story Winecoff Hotel in downtown Atlanta. The hotel was advertised as “fireproof and had no fire escapes, sprinklers, fire doors, or enclosed stairways. Elevators went up the middle of the building, and the open stairway containing the only stairs to the ground level, wound around the elevator shaft. Once the fire broke out, the open stairs and shaft acted like a chimney causing the fire to spread rapidly to the upper floors. The fire department’s ladders were too short to reach beyond the first several floors and the fire nets were inadequate for a fifteen-story building. Guests trapped on the upper floors attempted to use sheets to reach the ground or the roofs of surrounding buildings or, finding no routes to safety, jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. By the time the fire was extinguished, 119 of the hotel’s approximately 300 guests were dead. The Winecoff was the worst hotel fire in American history, and remained the worst hotel fire anywhere until a 1971 fire in Seoul, Korea, left 162 dead.

In the investigation of the Winecoff fire, arson was rumored, but the official finding was that a cigarette had been dropped onto a mattress in the hallway. There was little incentive to pursue the arson rumors and to do so might have jeopardized legal claims against the owners. The $3 million to $4 million in claims brought only about $350,000 from the hotel’s insurers. The Winecoff fire drew public attention to the issue of fire safety and encouraged state and local governments to require fire escapes and other safety precautions in the building of hotels. Subsequent hotel fires, particularly the MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas in 1980 in which 84 people died, have encouraged officials to mandate sprinkler systems, smoke detectors, and fire alarms and to regulate building standards and materials (Thompson 1986; Heys 1986).

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