₦airaland Forum

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Freelander262 I empathise with you but to be honest you should not be here seeking advice. You are loudly silent on if the building has a structural drawing and certification. If it does; you should be speaking with the Structural Engineer and if not satisfied; you need to then question their qualification and experience. Please note that Building Technology is science with set rules and calculus and may not be enough to come on a forum to seek subjective explanation. This picture alone is certainly not enough to get an objective causal effect of events that led to this structural failure.

Any building (structure) is a holistic amalgam of inter connections: for every action; there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you need a QUALIFIED AND EXPERIENCE Structural Engineer on site to take a holistic appraisal of the whole structure to come to a calculated and objective causal components that led to the failure. You will be surprise that all the "obvious" reasons you listed MAY not be related to the failure. The Structural guys call it STRUCTURAL STABILITY. If one segment of a structure is not stable; may lead to failure in some other segment. I suspect this might be the case. But then I am not a trained Engineer; just a simple Project Manager. So please revert to your Structural Engineer.

Please note while you are at it; the more you leave the failure unattended the greater the risk of it pulling down some other segment(s) of the structure which may lead to total collapse. Act fast. Good Luck.

@OP,

Was there no structural drawing produced before you started the construction and did you get approval from the appropriate government agency? Otherwise, if that building should collapse and kill someone, you would be committing multiple crimes against the law, including manslaughter. Please for anything more than a bungalow, you MUST engage the right professionals (i.e Architects and Structural Engineer) to avoid situations like this.

With what can be observed in the picture, the beam was not properly designed for the span of 15 feet (5m) and the column (what you called pillar) looks too slender for the height.

You will definitely need to demolish the beam (and possibly the column too) after a proper assessment by a qualified professional. The required beam depth and reinforcement requirement for that beam span must be properly calculated, and the same thing goes for the column. Also, after the construction, make sure the scaffolding is not removed from under the beam for at least 14 days (and prefarably longer).


As the previous poster suggested, you need to contact a Structural Engineer around your neighbourhood ASAP to give you a proper design and drawing.