A high-rise building in Manhattan was deemed unstable on Tuesday after authorities determined that support columns buckled, spurring evacuation of nearby buildings, according to officials and reports.
Officials said they also found “structural issues” on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer pharmaceutical building, which is being converted into residential apartments. “Two structural columns buckled, and there were multiple cracks and sagging floors,” the fire department said on X.
Workers were expected to begin stabilizing the building on Tuesday evening. According to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office, a team went through each floor and did not detect any additional movement of the support columns, allowing the on-site contractors to begin the emergency repair work.
The temporary measures are meant to stabilize the building and are expected to stretch into the coming days, impacting a busy corridor of midtown near the famed Grand Central Terminal, which is a hub for metro area commuters and residents as well as tourists.
Officials said they received reports of a “structural issue at an active construction site” on East 42nd Street, between Second and Third avenues, before 8am.
The fire department also posted a photo of a dramatically bent beam on its X account.
“It’s a very serious situation because the box beams – the steel beams – have started to bend and deflect from the weight,” John Esposito, the fire department chief, said. “We evacuated the building and started evacuations of surrounding buildings.”
Lake Powell, the US’s second-largest reservoir, threatens to plunge to unprecedentedly low levels this year after a historically bleak snowpack failed to raise its water level, scientists and water experts have said, adding renewed urgency to stalled talks over how to conserve a water source depended on by tens of millions of people in the US south-west.
President Trump renewed his call for the United States to have control of Greenland soon after arriving in Turkey for the NATO summit, reopening a fight that badly frayed relations with allies earlier this year.
On 1 May 2024, I met Palestinian paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in Gaza.
Less than two weeks before his daughter’s wedding, Khalil al-Masri set out with his eldest son to complete what should have been one of the family's happiest final preparations: paying for and confirming the reservation of the wedding dress she had chosen at a shop in Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood.
Russia launched a ballistic missile attack on Kyiv and the region early Monday, July 6, killing at least 26 people and injuring 100 more.
A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party.
