Originally published at: Watch as a swimming pool collapses into the garage beneath | Boing Boing
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#1 Thankfully no one was swimming at the time.
#2 With how cleanly that floor gave way and how thin it looks there’s no way a proper structural engineering design was done OR was followed. There really should have been some significant beams under that load and some should have stayed in place. The lack of any structure remaining is a major red flag to shoddy engineering and/or construction.
#3 Given #2 I’d be moving out of that building ASAP if I lived there.
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Water is a bugger to construct for. It is not only heavy, that was literally tonnes of water we saw coming down, but it sloshes and moves around playing merry hell on any supporting structure. It is also quite corrosive to all kinds of building materials and chlorinated water especially is lethal to normal concrete.
Somebody done goofed up here.
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The impact of the water knocked the camera into Oz. Somehow the garage footage switches from black and white to color halfway through.
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Lighting improves with the new giant hole in the ceiling. My home security cameras have a low light night and a bright day mode.
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This is why you will never see me in one of those fancy pools where like one or more sides are all glass on top of a building or opens up over a cliff or something. FUUUCCCKKKK that. One engineering or materials fuck up and you get washed out to oblivion.
That floor did not look very thick and just doing a very conservative 6 ft x 10 ft x 50 ft pool - that’s 3000 cubic feet of water which is about 25,000 pounds - or 12.5 tons! ETA - OOOPS - i grabbed the wrong number off the internet for weight of a cubic foot of water. It’s 187,283 lbs - or ~93.6 tons!!!
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I think your calculations are out a little…
2m x 3m x 15m = 90m cubed = 90 tons!
Metric System FTW!
Did you drop a zero somewhere I wonder? 125 tonnes sounds in the ballpark?
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The water density conversion was off.
3000 cu.ft is just over 100 cubic yards of water, which is just under a ton per cubic yard.
Maybe that’s why the pool failed? Incorrect unit conversion?
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yep. ~60 lbs per cubic foot (temp dependent). so 3000 ft3 water is about 180000 lbs or 90 tons
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OOOOPPPPS - that is what happens when you half read an answer on the internet and take 3000 cubic feet times the wrong weight of water per cubic foot.
6 ft x 10 ft x 50 ft = 3000 cubic feet of water
Using a conversion calculator this time, its 187,283 lbs - or 93 tons
Yes - the metric system is easier. I wish we had taught it more in school 
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Aha! Very cool.
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It’s just me but I instantly heard the theme to Car Wash in my head the moment I watched this.
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“Water has weight? My bad! I’ve only designed pools for zero-G habitats before.”
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My chance to tell here, yet again, the story of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (no longer around, was subsumed into Manchester University a few year back) main building, whose floors were not numbered but lettered. The top floor was K floor.
Rumour had it that K floor was intended to have a swimming pool but during construction someone determined that the structure could not support the weight of all that water, and a very late change of use was adopted.
So, K Floor Gym was the end result. It ended up being mainly used for exams.
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Newsweek is not great journalism but they got this covered with some details about location (Brazil) and online speculation about lack of rebar as a contributor. I am not a structural engineer so I have no idea how these are usually built but something tells me the same is true for the people who built it.
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That’s nice pool
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A friend of mine told me about a co-work previous job. It was in a major bank’s data center. He found water trickling into the data center. He calls the building manger to have him find out where this water is coming from… they found that there was a pool directly above the data center. 
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Anyone who says “it takes all afternoon to drain my pool” just isn’t properly motivated, clearly.
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Large empty pool room? That had to have some “fantastic” acoustics.
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