You should have a MILLION SUBSCRIBERS, not just 31K. The quality and depth of your knowledge and presentation is phenomenal. Thank you! 🙂

I lived in that building on the 6th floor from April 1997 to October 1998. My unit was on the opposite side of the collapse but even back then it was not uncommon to find water dripping from the ceilings out in the hallways especially on the side of the building which collapsed.

A couple of things to note. The engineer that inspected the building put a recommendation (or a requirement, you'll have to read the inspection report) for needle beams and a minimum of 6" x 6" boards. The contractor who was doing the work is owned by Andrew Wold (the owner of the building).

Can it be that the city ordered the demolition of the building so quickly after the collapse in an attempt to minimize the finding of more negligence by the city officials?

I live on the east coast and we have lots of older builds that do not collapse. Age is not the problem.... it's the lack of maintenance and greed of owners and lack of city inspections. I am not a fan of lawsuits BUT sue the lot of them.

I can't stress enough, as you mentioned: this avoidable tragedy was a result of ignoring structural deficiencies and nothing to do with aesthetics. The building dept for the town is most liable in my opinion because a "resigned" inspector signed off on the bracing a day before the collapse. Next is the current owner for refusing the proper fix. Third in line is the fraud of a previous owner recently selling the building as certified safe. My heart goes out to all those directly affected... "Ask not for whom the bell tolls".

That was a fair assessment. Well done. The City tried ( and thankfully failed ) to demolish the building which would have made it nearly impossible for investigators to get at the true cause - talk about burying the evidence? And what about the Fire Department? Why was their first search not thorough? Questions need to be asked there. NIST ought to be involved. All the defendants-to-be are now scurrying furiously to pass the buck for responsibility. There is something rotten in Davenport.

Phenomenal video! The illustrations with overlays are great & very helpful. Thank you for creating the video!

We live in the age of enlightenment. Building owners are enlightened to the fact that it's cheaper to pay off inspectors than to make repairs. I hope you were all enlightened by this comment.

This is fascinating. Your presentation is on point. My condolences to the people who lost their lives and all of the people that are now without a home. So many missed opportunities to prevent this tragedy.

Thanks so much for covering this. Lived in this area my whole life, mom works a couple blocks down. Theres been enough outrage about this locally that hopefully the owner and any others potentially responsible will be held properly accountable. Only seeing my city in the news for things like this breaks my heart, but hopefully the international attention will mean justice is served.

This building is only 3-4 miles away from me, and is in the city I grew up in. It is heartbreaking to all of us here that three people lost their lives (and one woman rescued by amputating one of her legs) due to the neglect of one man. It was a preventable tragedy.

Look I get taking a conservative approach to declaring a building unsafe and ordering an evacuation. But back in Fire School we were taught a few basics to use for making a quick judgement. 1. are all of the lines on the building still straight and square? Are windows still square? Still lined up? Any obvious bulges or distortions of the outer presumed load bearing walls? 2. Is anything falling off the building? 3. Are any large visible deformities noticeable in the outer walls of facade? Cracks? Or large ripples in a distinct pattern or covering a large area. If these are yes, get the people out and get somebody to wake up the building inspectors.

Great recap and calm, but precise and honest conclusions. I don't even want to know how many other buildings all around the world are being neglected the same way and are right now at the edge of collapsing ... Thanks for putting this together!

4:10 Love your animations. Between your channel and a couple other ones, I can get a lot of good information. The distinction between the brick facade and the bricks that were the actual structure of the building is the key to understanding this collapse. A facade brick falling is not too serious, but when the facade is being pushed out by the structural brick you have a serious situation. The bracing used was only trying to hold the facade. The most telling part of your video is at 4:10 where you can see a hole near the bottom right that is the actual support column missing.

I live in this community. Thank you for your reporting

I have watched many videos regarding the Surfside, FL condo collapse, and now this Davenport, IA, apartment collapse, and your discussion of what most likely happened to cause both of these tragic events is the best, simplest, and are the easiest to understand. Subscribed. Regarding a few of the comments that I have read, not all the "rich" are evil, but it sounds probable that the guy who owned this building needs to be charged with criminal negligence and if convicted should be put in prison pursuant to the law. Sounds also like the city officials of Davenport should have a lot to answer also.

I live in a similar woefully-maintained building, also in Iowa, about 100 miles from Davenport. The landlord could be the twin of Mike Wold, in both appearance and property management philosophy. Mike Bell - wish you could come here and give this place a once over. Your jaw would drop to the ground.

Well done Mike. There should be criminal charges but we dont put the rich in jail

Excellent job explaining what happened in terms that everyone can understand. This owner was negligent in his stewardship of this building and will hopefully face all legal ramifications.

He didn’t show up to his court hearing today either. He’s hiding in protective custody and needs to pay for this. Not only did Davenport lose a historical building, but 3 died, many injured, and everyone that lived there is now homeless and lost everything. Local businesses around the building are forced to close and need compensation for that. Another historic building across the street also managed by one of this scumlord’s llc’s was evacuated this week because of structural issues. It’s extremely sad because all of this could’ve been prevented for 50000 yet the multi Millionaire scumlord was too cheap to pay to have it done correctly

Great video!. You covered many aspects of the story and paid respect for the victims. Thank you!

Thank you for the detailed analysis. We won't get anything like this to be released by the city. They're in full coverup mode.

As with most property owners, profit over proper maintenance. Greed is rearing it's ugly head pretty commonly in this era we are in.

You don't let roof water run down the back wall for years, 2nd when fixing this you don't undermine the beams...

Excellent video, Mike. I appreciate the quality and extent of your research, the use of fast forward and reverse to clarify the nature of the collapse, and the animation that clarified the sequence of failure. This is a criminal situation on so many levels. The residents and workers were all at terrible risk, and some paid with their lives. The City of Davenport failed to protect the people, and the property owner was criminally irresponsible. I hope they show this video at the upcoming trials.

Wow, this was such an in depth study. 10/10

I believe the collapse was caused by the movement of the support wall away from the center of the building over many years which resulted in the floor pulling away from the "2 inch lip" as described in the original plan which was intended to carry the weight of the floor. The entirety of the weight of the free floating floor was then borne by the beams that had already begun pulling from their pockets. Over time, the beams continued to withdraw from the pockets as the bearing wall continued to move away from the center of the building. I think if you look at the photos in the document titled "Nuisance Abatement 23-6454" at times 2/9/2023, 03:39:12 PM and 2/10/2023, 12:12:41 PM, you will see evidence of the free floating floor and also that the beams have pulled four to five inches out of their pockets. At the time the photos were taken, the building was set to collapse.

Thanks for the effort you put in for this content

First time seeing a pic of owner. For some reason I thought of him much older.

I understand paint was also detrimental to the bricks. Thanks for this explanation. I wish it could be used in court against Andrew Wold.

Very sad. Thank you for sharing

This was the best analysis i have seen on this..good job

It’s outrageous that the city allowed that building to be occupied!….Criminal!

One of the best explanations I have seen. Thank you!

Hey, Mike. This has got to be the best structural integrity report I have seen. Thank you. From Cape Town.

Right on. Thanks for sharing.

I live in this area - if you find the owner (he's fled) send him back for trial!!

Mr. Bell - again, thank you for your analysis and conclusions concerning the building collapse. It was a masterclass. I have learned many new things from this video and your other videos on other disasters.

Appreciate your work in illustrating this building structural failure. Wonder if they had scanned the building with a laser it would have shown the outer wall was out of plumb?

Another ironic fact is that the City Hall is across the street and you can see the building that collapsed from the windows of the inspectors office😅😮

Your voice is so relaxed and calming. Definitely I wish you have more subscribers. Have a good time.

You are brilliant! You truly should be at millions of subscribers, and I don't doubt you WILL get there. Your exacting and informative approach is extremely impressive sir.

I really enjoyed your analysis!

Thanks for this overview.

Excellent video

This is an excellent and understandable presentation.

Well explained. You make easy for us lay folk to understand

Thank you so much

Gravity always wins. Think about how you'd try to support a falling person: You'd grab them under the arms and lift. The last thing you'd do is take a sledge-hammer to their ankles. This failure is an example of "progressive collapse". It was utterly preventable. The cracked and peeling facebrick was screaming "THE STRUCTUAL WALL HOLDING ME UP IS FAILING!!!! EVACUATE THE BUILDING!!! RIGHT NOW!!!!" I'm a licensed architect in California. I have an architecture degree from Cal Poly Pomona. I taught architectural design, structural engineering, construction materials and methods, and codes and law at various technical and design colleges for 15 years. This incident is outrageous! In Californa, architects have the authority to "red tag" unsafe buildings. I would have immediately done so if I'd encountered this on the job - after calling the police, fire, and building deparments to notify them of the danger it presented to occupants. Progressive collapse occurrs when the failure of part of a small part of a structure causes a larger part of the structure to fail. It can happen suddenly or it can happen slowly. In this case, it happened very slowly, over decades as the structural masonry behind the facebrick deteriorated due to water intrusion, then suddenly after contractors neglegently demolished face-bricking from the bottom up. Over the years, repeated freeze-thaw cycles slowly rotted the structural masonty during the winter and spring months. It was only a matter of time before the uninsulated, unreinforced, stupidly tall, double wyth brick masonry wall would catastrophically fail without proper renovation. All it takes is a hairline crack in the face-brick or a small leak in roof or window flashing to start the process. Plumbing leaks can do the same thing, but I don't know if there were mechanical services in the wall. Another video showed what appears to be a mechanical chase / stack mid-wall so that's another possible source of moisture intrusion. That wall rotted from the inside out. By the time the face-brick started peeling off, the load bearing wall behind it had ALREADY FAILED. That is the key point. The bearing wall failed structurally decades ago, with the loads it carried shifting to the floors and face-brick it was designed to carry. Whenever windows and doorframes start twisting and racking in a building, rest assured, some sort of structual failure has occured and/or is in progress. Always. Even if it's just due to differential settlement of the footings in a brand new building. The structure is moving, and rule number one in structural engineering of (conventional) buildings is that they are not supposed to MOVE. At all. Especially in the vertical plane. It's very basic. The bearing wall was no longer able to support the floor and roof loads it carried, and it was COLLASPSING in SLOW MOTION. For decades if Google Street images are correct. The loads it carried then shifted to the building's "skin" - the face bricks, and the non load bearing floors and cielings inside the aparments, causing them to rack and slope as the wall that supported them started pulling them down as it fell. The first contractor understood this, and wisely refused the job because the owner refused to pay for proper shoring to stabilizethe structure. A lesser contractor took the job, didn't use structural shoring, and started banging away at at the BASE of the wall with a sledgehammer, where loads are highest. Here's a tip: Work from the TOP DOWN to safely asesses the structural integrity of any suspect building. Remediate problems / provide additional shoring as the work progresses DOWNWARD. Again, this is BASIC. you can teach a child (or a slow witted adult contractor) this principal by building a multi-story card house, and then pulling a bottom card out. House go BOOM! That building was / is a death trap owned by a degenerate landlord who hired a cut-rate, incompetent contractor trying to save money. The city knew the structure was unsafe, but failed to enforce it's evacuation order. 3 innocent people lost their lives as a result. Such a shame.

So I lived in this building from April 2020-May 2022. A few notes. The first month living there was fine until something happened with the property management team leading to none of my maintenance requests being answered for the rest of the duration of me living there. The apartment floors became so dirty due to no cleaners or maintenance team that there is zero chance it could've passed an inspection. The locks on the door were failing leading to criminals coming in and stealing packages and pissing on the floors and elevator. This all lead to roaches of course. Every email I sent was unanswered so I just stopped paying rent and broke my lease.

Criminal negligence and 3 cases of involuntary manslaughter, should be the minimum he gets charged with

I lived on 3rd and brady, which is only blocks away. Wow, i drove past this heap daily for a full year. On that note, my apartment constantly had leaks and it was one of the most expensive apartments in the city of Davenport. Sad to hear about my old city on such terms. Davenport is a very old construction city, very beautiful.

Great video, and thanks for showing the owner, who might as well have committed murder. Amazing that just a bit of misdirected water over the years rotted those load bearing bricks out.

The city official's need to held responsible as well as owner. So many infrastructures failures and parties responsible skate out of it. Draw the line now before its too late

Not "sunbaked clay bricks"! They would be lower quality bricks, lower firing temperature, and not glazed and fired for water resistance like the bricks on the outmost layer.

Outstanding anaylysis and visual presentation of an utterly preventable tradgety. The building owner is guilty of multiple manslauter at the very least if not 3rd degree murders ( deaths that occurred as part of the comission of another crime - ignoring evacuation orders / proper construction shoring orders) I'm a licensed architect in California, and I was an architecture professor for many years as well. I taught structural engineering, construction materials and methods, codes and law, and a host of other subjects related to building safely and effciently. This video reduced me to tears. "Predicting" this collapse isn't / wasn't the issue. RECOGNIZING that the wall was in the PROCESS of collapsing and that it had been apparently been collapsing for decades prior to catastrophic failure is the issue. Pleanty of blame to go around, but most of it falls on the owner for failing to make proper repairs, and the City for failing to condem and evacuate the building a long time ago. The contractor hired to do the cosmetic work bears some responsibility for failing to stabilize the rotten brickwork uncovered by his demolition of the face brick. I'll do another post above about the role I believe the face-brick demolition played in the collapse above.

This needs more attention.

Thank you.

The same brick appeared to be used throughout the entire back wall. Only a fraction of that wall collapsed. It appears to me that large windows were removed at some point on the bottom floor in the section that collapsed causing failure of integrity in that area of the wall. I would wager that the majority of complaints came from that one section of the building. There is no excuse on the part of the city or the owner in allowing this failure to occur. Attempting demolition smells like attempted cover up!

Based on the design, it looks like this failure was contained in that area only. The rest of the building unaffected and could be repaired. Seems like it may have been CYA for the city. I would suspect their insurance carrier could be nervous right now.

This video was more helpful than other channels' hour+ wastes of time. Cheers :)

Thank you for giving a face to the POS owner. I can now envision someone responsible - a lay some worthy wishes upon him!!!!!

Clear, informative.

That was an excellent summary and demonstration of what happened. It’s clear the owner and the authorities will have to face up to 3 deaths.

Brand new buildings require proper maintenance. As a matter fact, they usually require more maintenance because they made out of materials that aren’t intended to last more than 20 or 30 years at the most.

The owner should go to jail for a very long time. Shame on him 😢

The engineer who inspected this building should have his license pulled and then he should be taken to criminal court and prosecuted. The owner of this building should be sitting in jail and prosecuted for reckless homicide.

Best video on this subject.

The owner of this building has a ton of properties in the Davenport area. My neighbors own a bar and he wont repair the leaking ceiling and air conditioner. Knew the dude was a cheapster a long time ago.

Did the owner know or understand how the buildings structure worked?

Great job.

I just can't understand why those 2x4's didn't hold up that brick.

I love how relaxing your voice/ accent it, is it South African? Also thank you for the informative videos

A quality drone video with 360 degree object avoidance might be useful to investigate the interior of an unstable building.

Subscribed! How does the city demolish this building in a safe manner? The city stated that the building continues to shift.

At one point (maybe 1999), the building was condemned. I suspect it wasn't repaired. It was bandaged and painted.

Good job.

The example of shoring at 4:14 looks impressive but it appears to be invasive with the bore holes for the steel beams. I wonder if just the act of shoring would have compromised the building and brought it down sooner if they had done that. .

Sue the hell out all of them

I Think You NAILED IT... 😎😎😎😎😎

Property owners will usually do this, because of warped incentives created by extreme private ownership. We need good public policy and governmental institutions to ensure that they can’t and aren’t incentivized to just throw paint over signs of serious structural distress.

The statement about the Surfside collapse doesn't hold up. Please review the videos by "Building Integrity".

i loved the part when the building said "its building time" and buildinged all over the place

Looks like the library across the street will finally get adequate parking.

At 1:56 you can extremely clearly see that AC unit or whatever sinking.

Seems that there are so many obvious signs i.e. Red Flags from your excellent Descriptive video... and from the Contractor who turned down the job after the owner looked at his higher bid, that would have included probably very Court worthy evidence that would greatly help with inditing the owner for involuntary manslaughter ❓️ And the fact the other Contractor warned workers away from the site. I believe the day it happened. I see this as a murder trial and a civil trial❓️

this is my biggest fear

Not only is there a lot of people that need to go to jail, we need to have every penny taken away from and given to these people that were that building

I don't think it's as much as the city's fault it's documented notice to vacate the owner of this building needs to be sued

More RED paint and cowbell a needed..

Excellent analysis, it looks to be a well built building back in the day. Too bad the rear wall wasn't maintained, it took many years to fail, this disaster should have been avoided and the building still useful today, with proper maintenance, repair, using qualified engineers and contractors it would still be today. It's a decent looking old building, that looks better than most new buildings, it a shame if it's demoed. It seems city should bare some of the responsibility?

Using 2x4s to prop up a 5 stories wall is like duct taping a crack on a road, utterly meaningless.

Wow I hope the owner goes to prison

Mmmm...was the entire building occupied when this happened ❓️

These days of widespread incompetence everyone has to be his own engineer, it seems.

So 3 people were still living in the building on the day of the collapse, because they had been told it was safe...and while the company hired to 'fix' the back section was working on it❓️❓️

If the owner foiiowed the engineer instructions this might have been prevented. Engineer recommended/ordered the steel beams on the inside be braced to take the weight off of the brick wall area so repair to the load bearing outside brick wall. In my opinion the city wanted to demolish this building to fast to cya themselves.

Oh the lawsuits are coming

IMO - owner was like…they are lucky to have anyplace to live they could be living on the street again. Pure arrogance.