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In Katy Texas (near Houston). There were 150 people at a mid-afternoon religious party in suburban Houston, when the 2nd floor garage collapsed into the first floor injuring people on both floors. Many children are seriously injured.

If they are designed and inspected by a structural engineer, most residential floors are designed to hold about 40 pounds per square foot. Many homes in the suburbs, built outside city limits, are not built to meet any codes or standards. A second floor on a garage, sounds like an after thought by a homeowner, so who knows what it was designed to hold.

I really hate to see a structure load tested with people for the first time. If you want to see how much your 2nd floor will hold, sand bags is the way to go.

philip964 wrote:http://www.click2houston.com/news/fddoz ... y/26678302

In Katy Texas (near Houston). There were 150 people at a mid-afternoon religious party in suburban Houston, when the 2nd floor garage collapsed into the first floor injuring people on both floors. Many children are seriously injured.

If they are designed and inspected by a structural engineer, most residential floors are designed to hold about 40 pounds per square foot. Many homes in the suburbs, built outside city limits, are not built to meet any codes or standards. A second floor on a garage, sounds like an after thought by a homeowner, so who knows what it was designed to hold.

I really hate to see a structure load tested with people for the first time. If you want to see how much your 2nd floor will hold, sand bags is the way to go.

It is actually very common for part of the upstairs portion of a house to be above the garage.

philip964 wrote:If they are designed and inspected by a structural engineer, most residential floors are designed to hold about 40 pounds per square foot.

Was there dancing?

No doubt there was dancing.

A news photo showed the exterior wall bumped out where the second floor was attached.

Supposedly people came from all over the world to attend the party.

Seems renting a venue would have been a better idea.

The TV news report stated the 2nd floor was designed to hold six people! I find that impossible to believe.

Chas.

Back in my college days (before the wheel was invented) I was at a Halloween party where the floor collapsed. Thankfully it was the bottom floor over a 2-3 foot crawl space. The folks in the middle of the room fell about 2 feet when the floor gave out, nobody was seriously injured. Those of us standing at the edges were able to lean against the walls and remain standing as the floor tilted about 30-degrees away from level.

Standard residential live load for most areas of the country is 40 pounds per square foot. So....

If the room was 20' x 20', that equals 400 square foot. Max live load would be 16,000 pounds.

Divide 16,000 pounds by an average weight of 170 lbs you would get a floor that would be maxed out at 94 people. No telling what other type of static load (furniture, etc.) there was on the second floor.

The article says there were 100 "total victims", but doesn't say if they were all on the second floor. Sad, but I would think the floor was simply just overloaded.

As others have said, two stories garages are pretty common in some areas of Houston.