ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In-person classes have been canceled at a local charter school for the rest of the week after the roof of its new gym collapsed.
School officials say the new gym at the Explore Academy middle and high school campus was basically complete. They were even planning on hosting a ribbon cutting Wednesday, but that’s been canceled, as well as all in-person classes.
Parents learned about the collapse through an email from the school Sunday night.
“The students are out the whole week now,” a parent told KOB 4 anonymously. “Because they have to get inspectors to gather and, at the request of the inspectors in particular, for students to stay away until they can just look the whole thing over.”
The parent said the incident has raised many more concerns about sending her child back to school.
“Students were going to be in that building in two days, and I think one of the big questions I personally have is, did it pass the inspection already?” the parent asked.
The answer is no. KOB 4 spoke with a rep from Albuquerque’s Planning Department. They said the construction company, AIC General Contractors, failed a building frame inspection on March 6. Inspectors found the trusses bowing or bending.
The city’s Planning Department didn’t know the roof had caved in until KOB 4 called Monday afternoon.
Explore Academy leaders say, as of now, it’s just the new gym that seems to be impacted, but they aren’t taking any chances.
“They discovered the damage and evaluated the situation and decided that we would go ahead and go to asynchronous learning until we have a sign off that the entire building and structure is, in fact, safe for students to enter,” said Katia Pride, Explore Academy’s director of outreach.
Pride said there was no obvious damage to nearby classrooms. The school will also have to bring in an engineering company to create a repair plan.
The city’s Planning Department will be sending a building complaints investigator to figure out what went wrong.
An interesting looking truss. How bad does your design have to be to mess that one up? It looks like a rather basic clear span done every day. I guess we can estimate the span off Google Earth.
Edit: Maybe not a basic design. Two girders carrying the trusses and ne of the girders collapsed. Possibly the bearing surface of the support column was inadequate.
It says they failed inspection on March 6th. So over 6 weeks later with no special loading the whole thing comes crashing down.
And they were expecting kids to be using the place in 2 days. So they were presumably going to get an inspection in the next couple of days or open without approval.
A failed structural inspection would require remediation before roofing and interior finishes commenced. There is a disconnect in here somewhere. Perhaps if the trusses were seen bowing after the roofing was installed, circumstances once again point to field staff or higher lacking appreciation for ramifications of the issue.
The truss could have easily been designed for not having that diagonal for mechanical reasons, or whatever. There does not appear to be any distress in the area of the missing diagonal.
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So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates
I cannot determine the type of framing. Was it long span trusses? with smaller short span trusses framing between. It appears the long span trusses have steel columns at the ends for supports. It appears to be a failure of the support attachment... but just a WAG.
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So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates
I'm not so sure about "easily", would proly need a "puter, otherwise maybe. I haven't looked at the design implications. I was just spewing. Not enough information yet.
Just a first blush impression - the large truss bearing failed and dropped one end of the truss. Pulling the adjacent bays on either side down with it.
The other large truss bearing didn't fail and thus the 1/3 of the roof stayed put.
It's pretty easy to speculate that the as-built connections between truss and column were different from the as-imagined connection the engineer calculated.
Pretty impossible for all of the trusses to be exactly the right length and each of the column pairs to be exactly the right distance apart.
Ok, not my field, but you don't need both chords of that style of truss to be separately supported, do you? A diagonal member from the unsupported chord to the supported chord serves the same purpose, doesn't it? The floor trusses for the original WTC 1 & 2 were only connected on the top chord, for load bearing purposes (there was a damper to the bottom chord), similar to the trusses seen here.
