Well that may not be exactly correct – A section of a garage in Maryland collapsed when a skip loader that was removing snow from the top deck piled rolled across a section and it fell through. Now just what did happen. The skip loader had a shovel full of snow. The deck collaped and it fell through two other decks before coming to a stop.
It doesn't sound like the weight of the snow did the structure in. Take a look at the pictures here. Click on the video – the pix are stills but you get the idea. The section that fell was only slightly larger than the grader, and note the pile of snow just to the left of the hole. Looks like the grader was moving snow to that spot.
Dale Denda, call your office.
JVH
I disagree with you thinking it was not the snow. Look at the photo again and you will see on the front edge of the hole has good amount of snow. The crater stops at the support beams underneath, almost perfectly, thus leaving the other pile still standing. Either way, it was easily avoidable.
Posted by: CSI Investigator | February 17, 2010 at 01:41 PM
For the parking structure engineers in the group:
If 1 cubic foot of wet/compacted snow equals 15 lbs
And a parking space is 10' x 20' or 200 sqft.
Then 1' of snow on 1 parking space equals 3,000 lbs.
Does 5' of snow at 15,000 lbs exceed the load limit of a parking deck?
Posted by: John Harris | February 22, 2010 at 04:02 PM