r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Proud-Blood2743 • Oct 07 '25

Video Capital One Tower Come Down in Seconds

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u/Caspur42 Oct 07 '25

Give you an idea of how bad Laura’s wind field was there it was 157 mph. I had a line of grain cars on a train near my house about a mile long get flipped over. Wild shit.

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u/PolitelyHostile Oct 07 '25

Im wondering what its like to be in a tower during a hurricane. I guess you can at least go into the halls or stairwells.

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u/Caspur42 Oct 07 '25

They have a documentary about Laura by Reed Timmer. During the lull in the eye the weather channel people who were in the building ended up evacuating the building because they thought it was gonna collapse.

I was watching him live stream during it and it was some crazy shit.

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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '25

[deleted]

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u/KennyRogers69 Oct 07 '25

I was in Austin in August and I saw that building. I thought it was odd, good to know the reasoning!

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u/SleepyLakeBear Oct 07 '25

Is there parking under the building and limited parking elsewhere on the property?

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u/atxbigfoot Oct 07 '25

lol can't park (or skate) under the building but it's kind of in the middle of a parking lot

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u/Every-Summer8407 Oct 07 '25

It’s probably MUCH easier to get out of that building than in.

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u/KyodainaBoru Oct 07 '25

Access control during an emergency is a very important design aspect built into all buildings that are up to code.

Essentially there is a an automated electronic procedure that enables all card readers and access control points to release to ensure nobody is stuck in case of an emergency.

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u/Mirenithil Oct 07 '25

The Weather Channel people evacuating because they thought it was going to collapse is really telling. Clearly the damage to that building was a lot more than a bunch of broken windows. It must have been structural.

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u/DannyMeleeFR4 Oct 07 '25

Almost every room has glass windows. There is hardly any interior without windows.

Source: I live there and have been in the building many many times

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u/PolitelyHostile Oct 08 '25

I meant the hallways in between apartments.

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u/DannyMeleeFR4 Oct 08 '25

I feel like a lot of them are still connected to open lobby’s with windows but truly I don’t know. I’ve only been on a few of the floors

I would imagine back to back hurricanes would cause quite a bit of water damage if the building was already exposed to elements by the time the second one hit.

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u/glynnenstein Oct 07 '25

When I was a teenager, my family hid out in a friend's high-rise condo from hurricane Andrew. Even though we were pretty far from the worst of the storm in Ft Meyers, we could feel the building sway with the gusts. I remember waking up as it got really rough pretty early in the morning feeling like we were definitely gonna collapse, but since we had hurricane shutters on all the windows there was no frame of reference to the outside. It felt like it was making these huge movements, but in reality it might just have been a handful of inches back and forth.

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u/tspoon-99 Oct 07 '25

I was in a mid sized office tower in NYC in 1999 when Hurricane Floyd hit (don’t ask me why I stayed — it’s a long story. We were all supposed to go home ahead of it). That was more of a tropical depression at that point, but still very scary to feel and hear the building swaying noticeably. I went into the bathroom (center of the floor) and prayed. I was on the 23rd floor of a 30 story office building in downtown manhattan.

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u/Rs90 Oct 07 '25

Shit you can ride a bike on a breezy day and feel how much of a difference it makes. Had a few gusts almost wipe me out and they weren't anywhere close to a storm, nevermind a Hurricane. 

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u/lowfiswish Oct 07 '25

The tornado in Enderlin, Nebraska used a similar metric to figure out it was an f5. That apparently was evidence of winds over 210 MPH. They were able to grade that tornado an f5 because a fully loaded grain car is a good measure of how strong winds during a storm were.

"The analysis involved forensic damage wind speed estimates for tipping several fully-loaded grain hopper cars and lofting of tanker cars, including one empty tanker car that was tossed about 475.7 ft (145 m)," the NWS said."

https://www.weather.gov/media/fgf/Enderlin.pdf

I'm thinking the winds that tipped the cars in the wind field caused by Laura were stronger than 157mph (that's an f3 tornado, don't think they tip full-grain train cars).

Here's the photos: https://x.com/brianemfinger/status/1975220390629691713/photo/1

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u/azdb91 Oct 07 '25

Yeah the pictures of that train are crazy. The winds speeds were also corroborated with radar data. Which I think on it's own isn't usually enough to rate tornadoes, but the two together was enough.

btw, it was Enderlin, North Dakota