The Lian Yak Realty Company broke ground and began construction in 1969 of a six-story edifice at the corner of Serangoon and Owen Roads in Singapore. Completed in 1971, the building housed the Serangoon Hotel. Unfortunately, as seen below, a flawed DIY design by an unqualified architect ensured that the hotel was destined for tragedy.
A New Hotel’s Inauspicious Start
The New Serangoon Hotel first made headlines in 1975, when 35 of its guests were knocked out and had to be hospitalized because of a toxic carbon monoxide leak. Despite the bad press, the hotel recovered, changed names, and resumed operations. By the 1980s, the building housed a branch of the Industrial & Commercial Branch on the first floor, and a night club on the second floor. The other four floors were occupied by a 67-room hotel, the New World Hotel.
All was routine on the morning of March 15th, 1986, until 11:25 AM. Then, out of the blue, in less than a minute, the entire edifice collapsed. Investigators discovered that the cause was an inept architect and inept engineers who had screwed up basic design and construction calculations. The Hotel New World failure was one of the worst disasters in post World War II Singapore. In the collapse, not a single wall or column were left standing, and the entire building was reduced to rubble.
Inept Building Design Led to Disaster
Initial rescue efforts were hampered by the fact that Singapore’s government lacked personnel trained or equipped to deal with such a situation. Fortunately, there were some foreign tunneling experts present in the city at the time, who had been contracted to build a new subway line. They were sent in to spearhead the rescue. Thirty three people lost their lives, and another seventeen were pulled out of the debris. Subsequent investigation revealed that the collapse was caused by incompetent architectural design.
It turned out that the Hotel New World building lacked a foundation. Specifically, a dead load foundation. Building designs have to account for two “loads” – a live load, which is the weight of the people and furniture and other things inside a building, and a dead load, which is the weight of the building itself. The Hotel New World building design only accounted for the live load. As investigators discovered, the building’s collapse was unsurprising: it was built based on incompetent architectural designs.
A Building Designed by Unqualified Professionals
The Hotel New World building’s design and structural plans had been drawn up by unqualified draftsmen named Shum Cheong Heng and Leong Shui Lung. In their calculations for an adequate foundation, the duo failed to account for the dead load – the weight of the actual building. Leong then took his incompetent plans, along with a recommendation for an architect, Ee Hoong Khoon, to Lian Yak Realty, which built the hotel. Khoon failed to spot – or ignored – the draftsmen’s flawed design.
The design flaw that was exacerbated by the addition on the roof of a water tank, two storage water heaters, a cooling tower, and four commercial air conditioning condenser units. Lian Yak Realty’s managing director, Ng Khoon Lim, personally oversaw the construction. His was among the dozens of lives lost in the collapse. In the aftermath, Singapore tightened up building inspections. It required building owners to more rigorously review building plans, test structural materials, and supervise structural works.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Goody Feed – 5 Facts About 1986’s Hotel New World Collapse that S’Poreans Probably Didn’t Know Of
Singapore Infopedia – Hotel New World Collapse
