re: 6 Dead, 7 Injured After Berkeley Balcony Collapse During 21st Birthday Party

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Good catch, from looking at the photo at first I thought it was a concrete balcony. Clearly its wood.

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It's a horrible situation and a terrible design. Stucco cladding is practically impossible to keep waterproofed properly. The maintenance of calking was probably not done routinely. You combine that with a cantilever wood balcony and you are inviting catastrophic failure. Although the design may be to code, the engineer and architect really screwed the pooch on that one.

law suit city.

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Any time I'm in the FQ and stand on a balcony and see it start to get really crowded I step off. Its paranoia but I don't trust 300 year old buildings

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I'm surprised something like this doesn't happen every year in the FQ. I don't stand on balconies in the FQ and I try my best not to walk under them. Only a matter of time.

How many were on the one on the bottom. Anyone on that one died.

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I have often heard that the french quarter is one good fire away from totally wiping it out. I would be more worried about fire sprinklers and fireblocking.

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Now that nothing but foreigners own most of the shops and bars I really don't care anymore. I still love NO, but I stay away from Bourbon unless I'm entertaining folks from out of town that have never been there and just want to say they have.

So you're at some chick's 21st birthday party. You're getting wasted out on the balcony and that one chick you've been wanting to hook up with is giving you the look from the other side of the balcony. You ask her if she wants a drink and she says yes. You step inside to grab a couple drinks thinking "frick yea, it's on" and the next thing you know her brains are splattered all over the balcony because the upper floor balcony supports experienced a catastrophic support failure. Whoa

That looks like it was just lagged into the floor joists, on my phone so I can't see the connection real well, but it doesn't look cantilevered at all.

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there is going to be a hell of a court case here in the near future.

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If they have 13 or more people on that balcony jumping around or other things there shouldn't be. I do hate it for the families though and hope the other kids make it.

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shite how many people did they have on that tiny little balcony

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Yeah, that's a lot of people for a small balcony.

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Berkeley balcony was decorative, ex-member of review panel says

“It was definitely not large enough to be what the city would call an ‘open space balcony,’ where groups of people could stand outside,” said Carrie Olson, whose 14-year stint on the review committee termed out last year. “This was meant just to be a place where someone could stand out for bit, get a breath of fresh air. Not for something like 13 people.”

Joshua Kardon, a structural engineer in Berkeley, said that while balconies have collapsed in the past, the accident on Kittredge Street was “very disturbing” because it occurred at a newer building.

The investigation, he said, will likely look not only at the condition of the wood framing and its “failure mechanism,” but at how the balcony was designed and built — particularly how water would be kept from rotting the wood — and what was found during inspections.

He said apartment owners typically don’t post weight limits for balconies and aren’t required to by law. The balcony at Library Gardens, which was about 30 square feet, was designed to bear 60 pounds of weight per square foot, according to a Berkeley city spokesman. That is up to state and city codes.

Olson said there are “a lot” of similarly decorative balconies around the city, and she would like to see tighter oversight of them.

“It seems that those students were just doing what young people do, crowding onto a balcony,” she said. “But it’s up to us, not them, to make this stuff safe. That’s just what kids do. We have a responsibility, not just as citizens of Berkeley but as citizens of the world who send their children here, to make sure our structures are safe.”

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