The recent building collapse in Angeles City owned by Ernest Lim and built by Golden Years have fueled select peoples’ fears in high rise living. While condominiums continue to sell, there are still a select few who dread high rise living, and on this building collapse, their fears might be in order.
A quick lesson we can draw from this is that it is still best to live in a standard home that is at most only 2 or 3 stories high, and when you build one, we recommend, if you can afford, make the walls a solid poured concrete so that each wall helps to bear the weight of the upper floors. If your house is built strong with load bearing walls, the weight is evenly distributed in all all sides, not just in the columns like most standard homes are built, to save on costs.
The ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) is the ideal super strong home because it is made of solid poured walls that help to support the upper floors. It costs high, but you can sleep peacefully in it. Even earth movements or earthquakes cannot intimidate you. An ICF house is built like a rock.
If the building is designed like it is built on thin stilt like columns, it could be mathematically safe on paper, but it might not stand during earth movements which are very common in the Philippines being in an earthquake zone.
One common practice among contractors nowadays is that they do not give ample time for the columns to fully cure as they build, they just immediately continue to build the next floor before the column can fully cure. A standard concrete column will need at least 28 days fully cure.
Based on reports so far, the final cause is still under investigation. But the owner/contractor could likely have prevented or reduced the disaster by doing these:
-Do not build beyond the approved permit. Reports say the project was approved as a 9-storey condo-hotel, but authorities were looking into a possible added 10th-floor swimming pool. That kind of added load should never be done without new structural design, permits, and engineering approval.
-Do not let workers sleep inside or under an active construction site. Officials are investigating why workers’ barracks were allegedly placed under/inside the structure. That greatly increased the death toll risk when the collapse happened before dawn.
-Stop work immediately when there are structural warning signs. Cracks, sagging slabs, unusual sounds, settlement, leaning scaffolds, overloaded floors, or water leakage should trigger evacuation and third-party inspection.
-Get an independent structural audit before adding major loads. A rooftop pool is extremely heavy. It needs calculation for dead load, water load, seismic/wind forces, column capacity, beam/slab capacity, foundation capacity, and construction-stage stability.
-Strictly follow DOLE/OSH safety orders. DOLE had reportedly issued a work stoppage in 2025 over safety violations, later lifted after compliance. A site with a prior stoppage should have been monitored more aggressively.
-Require proper inspections by the LGU, engineers, and building officials. Investigators are also looking at whether officials failed to inspect the site properly.
-Keep nearby buildings and public areas protected. The collapse reportedly damaged a nearby apartelle and killed a Malaysian tourist nearby, so exclusion zones, shoring, and evacuation planning should have been in place.
-The simplest lesson: never modify the design, add floors, add pools, or house workers on-site without full engineering approval and safety clearance.
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