The walls are reinforced. We are in the process of determining what the reinforcing is as the original drawings are not available to us yet, so we have made assumptions to see if we are even in the ballpark.
The stair are supported off of the cmu walls.
The stair tower is only supporting itself laterally. We have not tried looking at the flanges yet but will. we also have not accounted for the stairs framing at this point as we are trying to figure out how to quantify its benefit.
We are looking at analyizing an existing cmu block stair tower to potentially add two more stories to the structural. The existing tower is 8" reinforced cmu block and is roughly 30' tall. In running some preliminary numbers we are having a hard time getting the original structure to work from...
