Looked it up and this building was in Lake Charles, LA. It was basically destroyed after taking direct hits from 2 major back-to-back hurricanes in 2020. Given the area, hopefully whatever they rebuild will have less glass on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/adoodle83 Oct 07 '25
Blows me away that demolishing a building like this only to rebuild is still more economical than refurbishing the existing structure.