Yes indeed, that appears to have been the problem. A simple welding on of steel plates to those columns would have really made a difference. My question is, though, surely that needs to happen to the columns in that position ALL the way don to the ground – and has that been done yet?

Hope you’re feeling better Starkive – we need our Iron Man to survive !!

“engineers who examined both the drawings and photographs of the buckled columns said there was no evidence that extra plates were added to the columns as designed. The plates would have turned the columns — which had a classic, wide-flanged, I-shaped cross-section — into boxlike pillars.”

Yes – quakes are almost non-existent on the East Coast of the USA, although obv plenty on the West Coast. There was one in Washington DC back in 2011, which was a piddler – about a 2.3 or something – although that cracked the very top of the Washington Monument, as it must have got a bit of whiplash going on.

And yes, high winds definitely a problem – although i guess that being clustered in the middle of a group of other scrapers means there won’t be much happening on the actual facade. But so far, I haven’t heard anyone say that wind was the cause of the columns buckling. No comments yet – could take years!

Quakes are far less of a problem in NYC, though high winds can be at times.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kxb5Wz8aL3Q

There’s a whole raft of answers in there for the future of Wellington…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Farley_Building

“The Farley Building consists of the old general post office building, completed in 1914, and its western annex, completed in 1935. The original building was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White, who also designed the adjacent original Pennsylvania Station in the same Beaux-Arts style.
The main facade of the Farley Building (over 8th Avenue) features a Corinthian colonnade finishing at a pavilion on each end. The imposing design was meant to match that of the original Pennsylvania Station across the street.
Portions of the James Farley Post Office were adaptively reused and converted to a new head house for Penn Station, called Moynihan Train Hall, which houses Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road. The first phase, consisting of new exits, a connection to the New York City Subway at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, and an expanded concourse within the James Farley Post Office, started on October 18, 2010. The first phase opened in June 2017. Construction of the second phase, comprising a new train hall within the Farley Building, started two months afterward. It opened on January 1, 2021”

But the other thing about this, is that the building is now composed of two formerly separate buildings, and they have produced a massive block – with the plan for 1602 separate apartments within – and if that is all going to be air-conditioned, there must be MASSIVE amounts of HVAC ducting roaring throughout the building, all of which is going to be a fire hazard as well. They will need hundreds, maybe even thousands, of fire dampers throughout the building. This is just sounding like a badly designed, poorly constructed, crappy piece of design.

“The criminal inquiry is likely to be complex and labor intensive. The construction project at the site, the former headquarters of the drugmaker Pfizer, was set to be the largest residential conversion in the United States, and such projects can involve dozens of companies, subcontractors and developers with different roles and obligations. Piecing together what happened and why — and whether anyone was criminally responsible — can take months or years, and it is possible the inquiry could be closed without any charges being brought.”