Building Collapse

Primary reference(s)

US Department of Labor, no date. Structural Collapse Guide. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Accessed 30 October 2020.

Additional scientific description

Progressive structural collapse is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as ‘the spread of an initial local failure in a manner analogous to a chain reaction that leads to partial or total collapse of a building’ (Ellingwood et al., 2007).

Metrics and numeric limits

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists 63 countries that have seismic design building codes (UNESCO, 2008).

Many countries have standards on progressive building collapse, these include UK British Standards, European EUROCODE, Canadian National Building Codes and Swedish Design Regulations (Ellingwood et al., 2007).

Examples of drivers, outcomes and risk management

In many low- to middle-income countries building collapse has been attributed to weak foundations, substandard constructional materials, poor material mixing by construction workers, excessive load on strength of buildings and poor testing of building strength (Figueroa Fernandez, 2014). Building collapse is also caused by structural failures, poor supervision and workmanship, faulty design and disregard for approved drawings (Windapo and Rotimi, 2012). Additional factors include absence of soil testing before construction, lack of coordination between professional bodies and town planning authorities and inadequate enforcement of existing laws regulating physical development (Dimuna, 2010).

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) states that rescue workers and emergency responders may already have experience with entering collapsed structures resulting from construction (or other) catastrophes, earthquakes, fire and weather-related structural failures. Weather-related structural failures typically result from rain/snow accumulations on roofs, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides and even avalanches. Rescue workers and emergency responders also face the possibility of entering a structure that has collapsed following a terrorist attack. Terrorist activity may add additional hazards such as secondary devices, follow-on attack and residual radiological, biological or chemical contamination. Historically, terrorist activities that have resulted in collapsed structures include crashing commercial jets into the World Trade Towers in New York City (11 September 2001) and vehicular bombs, such as the one used at the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City (19 April 1995). Regardless of the root cause of the structural failure, rescue workers and emergency responders who enter a collapsed structure to perform their duties should be able to work safely (OSHA, no date).

On 24 April 2013 the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh which housed five garment factories killed at least 1132 people and injured more than 2500 (ILO, no date). This was due to additional stories being built that ignored the approved construction permits (Hira and Benson-Rea, 2017). Only five months earlier, at least 112 workers had lost their lives in another accident, trapped inside the burning fashions factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Most of the factories do not meet the standards required by building and construction legislation. As a result, deaths from fire incidents and building collapses are frequent (ILO, no date).

Earthquakes, sinkholes (which cannot easily be identified) and ground subsidence are also drivers of building collapse (WHO, 2019). Fire is another driver that can cause structural failure of steel and concrete buildings that can lead to the death of civilians and fire fighters (Meacham et al., 2010; Ahmadi et al., 2020).

The effects of building collapse include impacts on lives, livelihood and health as well as social, economic and environmental impacts (Babtunde, 2013). Since the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction launched its campaign kit for making cities resilient (UNDRR, 2010), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has been committed to making cities resilient and has engaged and published widely including sharing the ten essentials for making cities resilient (UNDRR, 2019). Engagement in this campaign is vital for enhancing the drivers for risk management with ‘Essential Four: Pursue Resilient Urban Development and Design’ which calls for integrating resilience into socio-economic development planning and infrastructure to safeguard development investments – which will help reduce the risks of building collapse (UNDRR, 2019).