Grady from Practical Engineering spotted! 😂

Australia might have learned from its building fire. The UK is a whole other thing. There are 1000s who still live in flats in dangerous buildings they can't sell and can't afford to fix, even though our similar tragedy was actually fatal. 💚

Leaked for 30 years…No warning before collapse🙄

This is why 'failsafe' engineering is important. 'Failsafe' doesn't mean it is safe from failure. Nothing ever is. Failsafe means it's designed to fail in a safe way. EVERY retaining wall will fail, sooner or later. EVERY sensor will give false readings, eventually. You're putting massive amounts of water on top of a mountain. That's not where it would naturally go. Plan for it to get out of there in ways you don't want it to.

There was a similar incident in London. Grenfell Towers. The cause was the same, flammable cladding. Not so lucky that time- 72 dead. We just never learn.

I toured that plant as an entering student and I asked how do you sense when it is full. They said a float with a microswitch. I said that is too likely to fail! They said it was inspected daily. And it overtopped.

the dude from Practical Engineering XD

If the mall was leaking water before it even opened, then the city is partly responsible because it should have been red tagged on final inspection. Good enough IS NOT good enough

This show has a lot of hard lessons paid in people’s lives and broken hearts 💔. We had an architecture disaster here in New Orleans. 3 men lost their lives, including one who had been reporting problems with construction site. Our community still mourns. 😢

It's outstanding the mall resists 30 years, but as usual, even seeing proof of leak, nothing done until it's too late, money first is the rule.

I remember driving my Jeep TJ up onto the roof parking lot at the Algo Mall back in Dec. of 2005. It was a cold night with slushy snow on the lot and I remember backing it up to a spot across from the entrance door ...just as I stepped out onto the roof parking, a pickup truck had come up the slope leading to the parking and crossed the lot in front of me heading for a closer spot near the door of the building ..as he was he passed by I felt the parking lot shake under my feet ..I remember thinking "oh my gawd"! It was a very unsettling feeling so much so that I jumped back in the Jeep and quickly drove down to the ground level parking. Years later I heard about what happened to it and it really bothered me that I never mentioned it to anyone ..would they have listened to me? There must have been others who experienced similar shaking as I did, I don't think the driver of the pickup would have noticed it unless he stepped out of his vehicle like I did just when someone drove across the lot ..maybe they considered it normal occurrence. I wasn't from Elliot Lake, it was my first visit. I did return to the mall on occasions when I was up for shopping but I never would park on that roof ever again! I do remember the buckets and mops and the cordoned off areas near the bottom of the escalator ...wish I had said something ..but to who?? ..in retrospect the ones running the mall would have buried it.

The fact that with 4 disasters.. only 2 fatalities.. that alone is amazing.. still, mistakes can be costly..

I love these oh so descriptive analogies! How powerful they are in helping the average viewer understand something they could barely imagine otherwise. And who among us doesn't immediately relate to "2000 Olympic swimming pools" of water being dumped "over the side?"

It's great to get more context on The Algo Mall collapse, living in Southwestern Ontario, it's so easy to forget about some of these northern communities.

I dont care what computers or testings that were done before the dam was built! That dam looks seriously anemic. If they built that thing anywhere near me and my family, I would seriously be looking for a new area to live in.

The prices at that mall were hard to beat, attributed to low overhead.

Should have used flex seal on that roof and flex tape on that dam.

Why don't you see more 30 year old cars on the roads in Canada? Road salt -> corrosion. Rooftop parking lot full of cars dripping salt water. I suspect that many parking ramps in snow country would show similar damage ........ if they managed to survive that long.

surprised Grenfell Tower fire wasn't in this video.

We need Pipelines as long as we use oil and gas, but: 1. How old is the pipeline? (conveniently there is no date on the Internet) 2. No map on the Internet, scrub presumably for security purposes? 3. What was the design parameters of the pipeline specifically at what pressure was the pipeline initially designed for and has the oil companies exceeded that initial design pressure?

What a pleasant surprise to see Grady as a talking head giving expert commentary! I find his engineering style very practical.

@43:32 the pipe was isolated and repaired, wait so that section of pipe was repaired but not the rest of the underground of known pipe that suffers the same defect?

Seeing the intro of this show reminds me of another tv series i use to watch long ago called Destoryed in Seconds. its pretty interesting to hear and see them compare side by side of the intro.

With the shopping Mall, calling it an Engineering failure is untrue, the fact is that there were leakage issues from the start and instead of fixing the roof waterproofing they stupidly and I would say neglectfully left it to leak for 30 years until the rusted structure could not support the car park any more. The building owners should be held responsible for the loss of life. Not an Engineering Fail, the Architects should have been partially blamed for the waterproofing only and forced to claim of insurance to get the building fixed 30 years earlier, but to allow the water to leak for 30 years that is just madness.

Most engineering disasters come from cutting costs to feed greedy pockets.

Freaking Grady with the freaking cameo practical engineering baby hell yeah

I just came across this channel and have watched 2 episodes so far and I absolutely enjoy the videos you have.... Extremely informative and alot of wow factors... Keep up the amazing videos Banijay Science!!!

The lessons of Melbourne didn't actually make their way properly around the world, as exemplified by the UK's Grenfell tower block disaster. What we do [should] learn is that we continue to repeat our generalised mistakes ...

Only a NY'er would say "I don't see any one around me committing a crime so maybe crime isn't a problem ". You are so used to having criminals , crazies and just unstable individuals all around that if a murder isn't going on right in front of your eyes it's a plus . It used to be that criminal activities were actually hidden from the general population by the criminals because the general population took a dim view of such activity and tended to do something about it , even if that was just reporting it to the police .

18:55 When you pick the lowest bid, you get contractors that cut corners and engineers sign off on this stuff and it never gets looked at until some failure.

Designers and architects come up with weird designs and unusual materials without a single thought about the safety of the people who use these structures, the builders and operators also share some of the responsibility.

I have the same idea for Ontario. We have hundreds of gravel pits and all are on top of the escarpment. My idea is to pump water from lake Ontario into the highest pit first and have them drain from east to west to eliminate the cone of depression around them so the natural creeks that dried up run again and people who now are getting water from a truck can pump from their wells again. When the water gets to the last pit, it runs into a penstock to produce electricity on demand. A simple solution that will bring people and recreation to the area. The best part is the water is filtered and settled out and after producing electricity you get cold clean drinking water. We could also use this system for cooling the water from industry with some of the pits being warm enough to swim in in the depths of winter. I see nothing but benefit and as permanent solution to several problems. we could even heat some streets and intersections in winter and heat homes.

*Remember when buildings were made from non flammable materials?* ... Ah, those were the times! Cladding a building in polyethylene is beyond stupid. PE is basically a fancy variant of candle wax. And when exposed to enough heat, it will of course ignite. Plastic in building cladding has claimed so many lives already, just the IDEA of wrapping a building in highly flammable material is preposterous. However, this is exactly what is required in many Western countries these days, you know, mostly because of the -Holy Climate Church and a decreasing scientific literacy- ... ignorance of crowd-pleasing politicians.

33:32 "I think the cheaper and easier to use product was used by mistake" 🤯🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Elliot Lake unfortunately did not get a new mall! They got 3 stores back ..! The loss of the mall and all its businesses still hurts the town !

The first video the woman said the roof collapsed with no warning. 30 years of water leaking was the warning.

Since Elliot Lake has lost it's mall it has also lost it's Civic Center a few years later due to an overload of the roof with an Air Conditioning Unit and excessive snow loads. And now it is about to lose it's hockey rink due to old glued wood beams no longer up to the snow loads. In Ontario Canada we have a very good building code, yet in Elliot Lake things seem to fail? It is common for homes needing roof trusses to be repaired at the wood joints as the old trusses were designed to barely handle the snow loads, who would think it would snow in Northern Ontario. But this was a mining town with the mining companies building and owning everything, when the mines closed the homes were sold for pennies on the dollar, we get what we paid for in Elliot Lake.

I call bullcrap about the rescue efforts as they would not permit the men (who were miners by trade) to go in and get the then alive trapped inside. The building was never built to permit parking on top.

I used live in a suburb on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia where the community of Tuggerah use a 2 level shopping centre with roof top parking. Parts of the shopping centre at the eastern end have been plagued by a leaking roof whenever rain falls. We have moved from that area and note that the age of the centre would be approaching 30 years. I wonder who inspects the mall?

Solar and wind is not clean or renewable. The both require massive materials that take huge amount of mining and processing of those material. Solar panels and wind mill have huge recycling problems.

I got excited to see Grady from Practical Engineering

19:00 so basically this overflowed because nobody bent that little black float arm in the toilet when the wall settled to make it stop running

23:15 Nice reflextion, makes it look like the bridge has a Renault logo as middle support.

And how many thousands of miles of old fragile oilpipe is still used in US?

1400 kilometers of doomed-to-fail pipeline, they replaced 0.01 kilometers, is that right?

I remember the London high rise fire; but not this one!!🤔 Siding lined with flamable plastic wow!! Cigarettes belong in a real ash tray not a plastic yogert container on a flamable table. How great of building codes and inspectors!!

Love seeing Grady!!!

My local town has a pump storage resevoir. It sets on bluffs above Lake Michigan & is operated by Michigan's 2 largest energy providers. It is an 800 acre resevoir. Built in the late 1960's, so far no problems.

It's Grady!!!! If you don't watch Practical Engineering, you should. I love his channel.

Hard to EMULATE ancient Egyptians Achievements !

29:34 Why wont they explain how they know it was a cigarette butt? Countless times have watched documentaries and they make such claims of knowing the cause of the fire but yet they wont say how they knew it.

🎉 Water when contained lays Flat. Just like our oceans 😮

I live in Sudbury Ontario, not far from Elliot Lake. The mall there was almost identical to the mall here in downtown Sudbury. The mall in Sudbury was just as bad. There were countless inspections and millions spent to fix the Sudbury mall. Everyone seen the rust, and parts of the roof were sagging due to asphalt being laid each time pot holes in the roof garage formed. It was a disaster just waiting to happen. If it wasn't the Elliot Lake mall collapse, the Sudbury mall would have collapsed long ago. To this day, May 2024, I refuse to go in the disaster of a mall just waiting to happen. But why was it allowed to happen? Elliot Lake and Sudbury have identical climates. You didn't need to be an engineer to notice the buildings were in disarray, you can see the leaks and the sags and the rust. I have an anecdote that would explain exactly what caused the Elliot Lake mall collapse. I use to live in an apartment on the Kingsway in Sudbury. It was a 3 story walk up, I lived on the 3rd floor. The landlord at the time was an old lady who owned the building for a long time, and it was her husband that did any repairs. There were small leaks on the roof, and the building needed a lot of repair. The couple was old and the repairs needed were too great for an old man, and too costly, so they sold building to a number company in Toronto. Repairs were never done, the people that ran the building were basically slum lords and no money was put into the building. One summer, in June and July, there were many storms with heavy rain. The roof would leak, bucks would be put in the hallways and people complained, but nothing was done. All we were told is they were looking for a contractor to fix the roof. The city was called, they ordered the manager to make repairs to the roof, and we were all told, the roof was going to be repaired. That never happened. Storms kept coming, and the roof leaked more and more. Once again, the city (by-law officer) came and ordered repairs, but none were done. What the tenants didn't know, the old guy that use to do the repairs, didn't know what he was doing. When leaks would start, he would go up on the roof and poor a bunch of tar to patch things up. Over time, on hot days, that tar would melt and flow into the storm drains on the flat top roof. The drains were plugged up and water had nowhere to go and just accumulated. That summer was really hot, and there were many heavy rains. Over four feet of water pooled on the roof and one afternoon, the roof exceeded its max weight capacity and started to collapses. Water poured in the hallways outside my apartment like Niagara Falls. The fire department came, shut down the electricity, evacuated everyone and condemned the apartment until the ordered repairs were met. The building manager cut out some of the old pipes that were clogged, and did some patch work on the roof, and some people were allowed to move back with the promise repairs would be done. Proper repairs were never done. They defaulted on payments to the contractor that did some repairs, same with the electricity bills that mounted to over $50,000. The place stunk, people complained to the city, nothing was done. After, like a year, the city finally got tired of people complaining and condemned the building. I lost all my belongings, because the city failed to force the new landlords to compliance and allowed the building to degrade to the point it was a major hazard. It was clear the owners of the building never had any intentions to fix the building and it was clear the city had no intentions to do anything about it. The Elliot Lake mall, and the Sudbury mall were allowed to become disasters because both cities turned a blind eye and accepted the "Ya, were are fixing it, we are hiring contractors bla bla bla" BS. In my case, the city didn't do anything until it was costing them 10s of thousands. City inspectors need to do their jobs and the city needs to enforce the penalties, and put people in jail for not doing their job. It wasn't snow and salt that caused the Elliot Lake Collapse, it is useless city council members and workers that didn't do their jobs to prevent it from happening in the first place.

There was 30 years of warning in Elliot Lake.

The recent Oroville Dam Spillway collapse disaster - exactly the same scenario. Construction companies lying their butts off. _Yeah! We built on top of bedrock. No no, we weren't lazy and put it on soil! Bedrock, yes, we put it on bedrock._ How many other dams are unsafe due to paid-off or lazy inspectors, and psychopathic construction company brass? Oregon's Trojan Nuclear power plant cooling towers were found to be built unsafe, not to code. Ready to collapse in a very minor quake. They were imploded before a disaster could happen. But how many engineering ticking time bombs remain?

To the firefighters in Melbourne i gotta give yall a big 'atta boy.

so much space the decision to save space with cars parking on top is odd

I remember when the provincial Special Response Team or something like that, the elite rescuers, were afraid to go in to rescue two women that people could hear screaming. The former miners, some of them specialized in mine rescue were prevented from going in. That special "provincial" team should have been disbanded after this and the members should have been made into parking attendants, an obviously useful profession for them. This was a sad tragedy which I'm sure came down to money. RIP to the two women who died because of decisions made by morons. My opinion.

How many older malls across America and Canada are in the same rotting condition?

Lake Conway is in the process of being drained to clear it out and make it deeper. I think it's a project planned to take four years? I know some local residents who fish a lot aren't happy about it

Pretty sad when the heart and soul of a community is a defective 80's mall.

why in the hell did they build a lake above ground to begin with? Oh, and then after a catastrophic failure, they rebuilt it AGAIN. Brilliant in Missouri are they.

8:29 Foreign steel thickness is made by pressing layers of thin metal sheets together . American steel was made as it moved down a conveyor system, this thick sheet layer of hot steel was being compressed at certain stages in the line, too a lesser thickness and cut when the required amount of sheets was met.

any rooftop area drains/inlets to collect runoff? was the panel slab approach cheaper than a seamless pour in place to minimize joints?

It’s amazing that engineers found a cost effective way to release torrents of water in order to turn the turbines and create electricity to power thousands and thousands of homes and businesses and then using the same water that generates the power to be profitable can actually be stored and pumped back up into the same reservoir that in turn will eventually be released again to spin the turbines to create more electricity. This is mind blowing to someone like myself who has no engineering knowledge. I would be more inclined to think that this would be counter intuitive and defy some of Newtons basic principles. There has to be some sort of loss here somewhere to some capacity but I suppose it’s superlative and inconsequential for me to argue about. What do I know about hydrology and engineering

Olhando por esta perpectiva, parece com um coração.

Anywhere there's concentration of energy, (nuclear, kinetic, gravitational or other), there's a potential explosion or other disaster.

Bill Hader from Superbad and SNL makes an outstanding performance as a physicist with a ridiculous Overstated English accent. Although straining Credibility That A character could ever exist In real life Bill imagines a character Possible only in his mind and in late night cartoons. This performance as a physicist will have you rolling on the floor.

Would painting tar over the 9x2 slabs then laying concrete have helped? Neighbourhood oil well, go get em boys!

The winter collapse was not cleaned up until months later with wild life entering to eat from open grocery stores.

They didn't say WHY the oil leak was not detected sooner with less damage!!😞

Yooo they got my dude Grady in here

I can't understand the idea of a rooftop parking lot. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have the mall built above the parking lot? Also, how could they just ignore the leaking for thirty years? Obviously something was wrong, but they just kept on assuming it would go away and that the leaks were not causing any trouble? One would think that mold would be a problem too, but they ignored it for thirty years???😵‍💫🙄 The dam on top of the mountain...maybe I am just paranoid, but I would not live nor recreate beliw a dam. I don't care how much assurance there is from those who built it or from the local government/leadership, there are countless examples of shortcuts and design flaws that have led to catastrophic failure in the past. I don't want to be downstream of a dam anymore than I want to live on the slope of a volcano!!!😐😶

Did that Melbourne fire involve a panneling similar to the fire in London?

"this failure was so sudden", ummm no it was failing for 30 years

the cladding issue is one of the world, we never listened until grenfell tower, and many other countries are having their own fatal awakening still, special when update old building that have stay put firewall with deadly skins. 40 years ago Grenfall would not of spread to kill the many it did. The inner stair way never burned but was useless as smoke blocked it and the fire spread around the building in a way it couldn't before making the fire fighters make the mistake of saying stay put rather than get out. All because they wanted poor to move or improve and they made the place look nice for the local rich who saw the building as a eye saw, each and every rich local was responsible for the death there. All they wanted was high property values, not the place is sign by the death of the tower and the tower will forever be a eye saw lowering the value righteous of a murder site.

That mall looks just like the condo downfall in Florida! Many saw it coming in both cases and ignored the obvious. Cold hearted snakes🍸that mall killed 2 but the condo🤔😤😡holy shit!

"The ruptured section of the pipeline was isolated and repaired" and the other 1800 miles of the same pipeline was left in place. What could possibly go wrong? "At the time you woudn't consider that risky in any sense of the word" Says Keystone oil pipeline executives demanding that they put a pipeline through your commmunity and across your river.

5:52 is no doubt a big trategy, but IMHO worst mall disaster (that I'm aware of) happened in Kemerovo city, Winter Cherry mall. All started from small fire in kids playground which grew exponentialy since foam rubber caught fire. In the end 60 fatalities of which 37 we're children.

From the beginning even before the mall opened they said water was leaking in. Then they said the roof collapsed with no warning. I guess water leaking in wasn't warning enough that there was a problem.

So they replaced the one section of split pipe how much of that pipeline was made with that same welding technique and how much of that pipeline was replaced after this disaster? Just the one section? I wouldn't feel safe with just one section being replaced. And people wonder why there was the massive pipeline protests and the water protectors. This this exact scenario is why people don't want pipelines running through their aquifers

I grew up in Elliot Lake took my driver test on the roof of the mall and spent thousands of hours in the Arcade there. The roof leaked since day 1

I kept hearing "hope" used, even by the narrator at the end. That word (or any variant thereof) should never be used in conjunction with engineering risk management.

so the reservoir is drawn down and loaded again over a day or so? sounds like rapid drawdown and reloading. sounds scary

... and housing was allowed to be built over an oil pipeline...!

Heart shaped lake!

Use power to fill it, gain power to drain it. Overall a negative gain of power. Advantage more power during the day.

I’ve never seen a parking lot on top of a malls roof very strange setup.

The moral? No roof top parking!!

A system should never get to 'High High'. The system should stop at 'High'. They missed explaining what had gone wrong here.

So does that reservoir really produce more power than is required to pump the water back up the mountain??

5:45 The guy in the silver car, 8 seconds later....

I wonder if they regularly serve the top of the new Reservoir to make sure the HiHi alarms are still at LOW point of reservoir walls 🤷🏻‍♂️

MY THOUGHTS AND OPINION ONLY 12:40 east? That looks like SW part of state 2 me?!!?!!

I live near Anchorage Alaska. Known for earthquakes and damages like in nineteen sixty four. We have passed that time when its known for a earthquake to happen again.. who will die this time

With the dam, how did they not realise that the settled part of the wall was lower. I mean it is not like you need a laser sighted spirit level, you have a great big body of water that provides a level and they were pumping it near the top every single night and the tide mark would still be visible in daylight.

@13:40 - I wonder if this Warren Witt is the father of Aaron Witt that has the construction equipment KZfaq channel?

On top of a mountain that’s a foothill out west

Melbourne tower sounds like Grenville Tower all over again

Is the narrator Moss from The I.T. Crowd?!