Friday, April 26, 2024 
Friday, April 26, 2024
October 18, 2019
As reported on CBSnews.com, speculation mounted Wednesday about possible causes of the weekend collapse of the half-built Hard Rock Café in New Orleans, reports the CBS affiliate here, WWL-TV. As authorities shifted from rescue operations to tearing down the structure’s dangling wreckage, theories surfaced about what compromised the concrete slabs that rose in tiers from the ground until they pancaked Saturday morning, killing at least two workers.
Several people who worked on the $85 million project said they’d expressed concern over the structure as they built it, and possible video evidence lending weight to those concerns appeared late Tuesday on social media.
One video, shot by a local contractor, purports to show the concrete slab above an upper level of the Hard Rock sagging to the point of bending temporary posts, called shoring jacks, that supported it.
Randy Gaspard, a local concrete contractor who posted the video, said it was shot by a worker on Thursday, two days before the collapse. Gaspard wouldn’t identify the worker or say who employed him.
“Look, Papo, ‘the best engineering!’ Look at these large stretches (between supports) and s–t beams! (unintelligible) They’re already to the point of breaking,” the worker says in Spanish in the video.
“Look at how it’s bent already! They couldn’t remove it because it’s too bent and it has too much pressure. The huge spaces without beams – look! What a very s–t structure these architects and engineers are building! … This is seriously bad, Papa!”
Gaspard said he’s been told workers had been removing the temporary posts and “when they got to less and less of them, got more and more load on ’em, they tried to tell the contractor to stop but were told to keep going.
“What it shows is that the concrete deck has so much deflection that they can’t remove the shore posts,” Gaspard said. “They have so much load on them, it’s bending them.”
New Orleans Fire Department Superintendent Tim McConnell told WWL Wednesday that officials are aware of the video and that it’s become a piece of evidence in the investigation.
