The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

The Skyline collapse—and property rights vs. human life

Scan­dals at one level is a beach read, a mix of a thriller and novel of man­ners. But at another, it’s about bureau­cratic lax­ness, which can kill work­ers—not just drain investors’ bank accounts. – D.R.

Four­teen work­ers died and 34 were injured in the real build­ing col­lapse that inspired the one in The Solomon Scan­dals.

The Sky­line Plaza dis­as­ter at Bailey’s Cross­roads in North­ern Vir­ginia hap­pened on March 2, 1973—the result, many said, of pre­ma­ture removal of con­crete shoring.

Fines amounted to just $300 for the shoring-related lapse and $13,000 for vio­la­tions of worker safety codes. Not so coin­ci­den­tally, an even worse dis­as­ter fol­lowed in West Vir­ginia just five years later, killing 51 work­ers in America’s most deadly con­struc­tion acci­dent.

The Sky­line death toll of 14 was minor com­pared to the calamity at the fic­ti­tious Vulture’s Point, the IRS/CIA build­ing that I located in the gen­eral area of Dyke Marsh, south of Alexan­dria. I added a hill and other topo­graph­i­cal fea­tures miss­ing from the actual site on the Potomac River. The nature-lover in the right photo is “stalk­ing the birds hid­ing in the cattails.”

Aided by Gor­don Bat­son of Clark­son Uni­ver­sity and M. Kevin Parfitt of Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­sity, I came up with my own causes for the Vulture’s Point dis­as­ter, which, unlike Sky­line, didn’t hap­pen dur­ing construction.

The blame game in real life

In real life, the Sky­line col­lapse raised a num­ber of issues that linger on today, such as:

1. Who caused the col­lapse? Was it entirely the fault of a sub­con­trac­tor? Or did the Charles Smith inter­ests or part­ners put exces­sive pres­sure on the sub­con­trac­tors to hurry up the job? I’ll not draw con­clu­sions here, just raise ques­tions. Rel­e­vantly or not, three men died and 33 suf­fered injuries in an ear­lier col­lapse on June 6, 1968, at Crys­tal City Mall, another Smith project. “An esti­mated 100 tons of wet con­crete,” reported the Wash­ing­ton Post, “tore through the ply­wood deck­ing and crum­pled tem­po­rary sup­port­ing 4-by-4 jack posts like match sticks.”

2.  To what extent under Vir­ginia law should a gen­eral con­trac­tor be crim­i­nally liable when col­lapses and other acci­dents occur? In a related vein, would legal respon­si­bil­ity and moral respon­si­bil­ity in these sit­u­a­tions always be the same?

3. How many con­struc­tion peo­ple were work­ing at Sky­line at the time, and how about the rumors that some unknown aliens per­ished, and that their remains were mixed in with debris and taken to a rural  location?

4. What about the less than fully heeded lessons—as shown by the West Vir­ginia disaster?

5. Think­ing at a higher level, how about the gen­eral issue of prop­erty rights vs. human rights?

The fifth ques­tion is on the mind of Jon Stone, the reporter in The Solomon Scan­dals, as he hur­ries to the site of the fallen IRS/CIA build­ing. Solomon, owner of Vulture’s, stinted on rebars and other mate­ri­als. Did his prop­erty rights pre­vail over safety?

Stone recalls sim­i­lar issues asso­ci­ated with the Kent State mas­sacre, the after­math of which he reported. The National Guards­men had killed four stu­dents, and debate arose over the value of the stu­dents’ lives vs. the need to pro­tect property—the ROTC build­ing had been burned down three days before the shooting.

Jon and his rec­ol­lec­tions from Kent are fic­ti­tious, but I myself reported on the death of Bill Schroeder, an inno­cent ROTC cadet. “There’s noth­ing bet­ter that [sic] a dead destruc­tive, riot mak­ing com­mu­nist,” one prop­erty rights zealot wrote Schroeder’s par­ents, “and that’s what your son was, if not he would have stayed away like a good Amer­i­can would do.”

For more on Skyline

You can read more about Sky­line in Wikipedia, with links to source news arti­cles. Also see a report on col­lapse prevention—with pho­tos of actual disasters—from the National Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­ogy. You can also read the Belt­way Boys blog, whose author lived in the area and remem­bers the police sirens, the dust in the air above the col­lapsed build­ing, the heli­copters cir­cling over­head. “Some­thing seemed dif­fer­ent,” he writes. “Instead of one build­ing, there were two.”

Three rel­e­vant books are To Engi­neer Is Human: The Role of Fail­ure in Suc­cess­ful Design, Why Build­ings Fall Down, and Col­lapse: Why Build­ings Fall Down.

Beyond Sky­line: The con­crete and occu­pa­tional safety issues—downplayed even after the collapse

The Solomon Scan­dals, while focused on the media and the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion, could just as eas­ily been about the polit­i­cal pres­sures at the Occu­pa­tional Safety and Health Admin­is­tra­tion, espe­cially as weak­ened under George Bush, although the prob­lems there pre­ceded him.

Check out a Charleston (West Vir­ginia) Gazette arti­cle men­tion­ing the Wil­low Island nuclear plant con­struc­tion dis­as­ter and Sky­line in the con­text of occu­pa­tional safety and weak con­crete. Wil­low Island killed more work­ers than Sky­line or any other U.S. con­struc­tion acci­dent after scaf­fold­ing col­lapsed and 51 work­ers plunged to their deaths on April 27, 1978. “Agency inspec­tors,” the Gazette notes of OSHA in Skyline’s case, “cited the Sky­line Plaza con­trac­tors for pre­ma­ture removal of forms and shoring beneath the building’s top floor, and dis­man­tling these sup­ports with­out first test­ing and inspect­ing the con­crete.” But did OSHA take too long to come up with appro­pri­ate, concrete-related reg­u­la­tions that could have saved lives in West Vir­ginia and else­where? What if the feds had required well-trained com­pany safety inspec­tors to cer­tify con­struc­tion sites, for example?

Even to this day, is OSHA doing all it could to pro­tect work­ers in those sit­u­a­tions and oth­ers? Is fund­ing suf­fi­cient? And what about a court deci­sion that, in the words of reporter Ken Ward’s Gazette series on Wil­low Island, ended OSHA’s abil­ity to “tie down down con­trac­tors through a multi-employer pol­icy. Cita­tions would be issued to gen­eral con­trac­tors, as well as smaller sub-contractors.” Just as with Sky­line, one issue of the Wil­low Island tragedy was whether the peo­ple involved gave the con­crete enough time to set. So assign­ment of blame is no small issue. To bet­ter appre­ci­ate Wil­low Island’s human toll, see a Gazette video, shown above.

Will the Obama admin­is­tra­tion improve OSHA and work toward the hir­ing of more inspec­tors? An arti­cle in the April 23 Las Vegas Sun leaves some hope: “Echo­ing remarks she made ear­lier this week, U.S. Labor Sec­re­tary Hilda Solis said Thurs­day that her depart­ment would strengthen the Occu­pa­tional Safety and Health Admin­is­tra­tion by adding hun­dreds of inves­ti­ga­tors and spend­ing tens of mil­lions of dol­lars on enforce­ment activ­i­ties. ‘We’ll have more peo­ple out in the field to make inspec­tions, and we’re going to have to be a lot smarter and strate­gic on how we do that,’ Solis said. ‘We are going to look at indus­tries where you have a high inci­dence of acci­dents.’ She said OSHA would focus on the con­struc­tion indus­try in particular.”

About the Sky­line col­lapse photo on this Web site (now in the upper left)

The photo was taken by Hai Lew, research struc­tural engi­neer, Struc­tures Group, Mate­ri­als and Con­struc­tion Research Divi­sion, NIST, Gaithers­burg, Mary­land. The photo is part of the NIST report ref­er­enced before. The PDF link is here.

Note: This post orig­i­nally appeared on Novem­ber 29, 2008 and was updated in April 2009. I’m play­ing it up again for the ben­e­fit of latecomers.

Related: Sky­line Work Song: A poem by Andrew Solarz.