When cosmetic damage is structural

I guess decorative isn't always decorative. Yes. Things look aesthetic. Maybe you know that you have a structure underneath and a facade or a curtain window on the outside. But when you see that curtain wall or facade, maybe some tiles or some decking that starts to slough off a little bit. That should get your attention. Your building's telling you something. I mean, even if it is aesthetic, it shouldn't be falling off. Your building's moving. And if it's not aesthetic, then you really need to get an engineer out there to find out what the problem is. One of the projects that I'm working on is an office building pedestrian bridge. And this office building is great. It's got a very heavy timber look to it. Aesthetic. It kind of looks like a log cabin. And this pedestrian bridge is 30 feet long. It's got three 10 foot or so long bays. And it has access underneath the bridge to like a day basement area, which is all offices, as well as the second and third story. But the top of the bridge, the walkway part of the bridge is concrete. And they did that because it's nice and smooth. It's ADA friendly. And the building manager just assumed that the decking, these basically half logs that were underneath the bridge. So you can see this when you go under. They started to. First they started to deflect and sag. And then one or two started to fall off. And so they just kept putting it off. And then they could. And then when one of these members fell off, they could see that the concrete itself was only two inches thick. Two inches. And this is a 10 foot span. Concrete cannot span 10 feet when it's only two inches thick. So that aesthetic part, that log cabin look. The engineers were being efficient with the materials. Maybe they were working hand in hand with the architecture, the architects at the time. But it definitely was part of the structural skeleton of that bridge. And so I said, yeah, you have to close this down. This two inch concrete thick slab is not going to hold up. And they were very lucky, actually, that they didn't have any kind of an injury. After I did the analysis, it basically could just hold itself weight up. It probably was only holding the amount of traffic that it had because materials are a little stronger than we use in our design codes. So maybe we say it needs to be 2500 PSI concrete. But all of the break tests say that it's 3000 PSI concrete. So it was only holding up due to our factors of safety, I'm pretty sure.