Building Collapse

Primary reference(s)

US Department of Labor, no date. Structural Collapse Guide. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Accessed 16 February 2025.

Annotations

Key relevant UN convention / multilateral treaty

The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. This international treaty, in times of peace, requires risk management plans to protect cultural assets when an urgent situation arises such as the failure of a structure and fire (UNESCO, 1954).

The International Labour Organization C167 - Safety and Health in Construction Convention, 1988 (ILO, 1988).

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 outlines seven clear targets and four priorities for action to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks including substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services, among them health and educational facilities, including through developing their resilience by 2030 (UNDRR, 2015).

Drivers

Weather-related structural failures typically result from rain/snow accumulations on roofs, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides and even avalanches. floods can also undermine foundations, leading to structural instability and potential collapse, as during the 2013 Central European when floods caused significant structural damage to buildings and infrastructure across Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic. Landslides and associated movements of rock can impact the stability of foundations and cause structural failures. Extreme weather evens such as cyclones, and severe storms can cause widespread damage to structures through high winds, storm surges, and debris impact, with damages worsened if the buildings are old or poorly maintained (Hain et al., 2023). Tsunami can inundate coastal areas and damage structures, and permafrost thaw and retreat affect the foundations of buildings leading to damages and even collapses. Earthquakes, such as the Turkiye-Syria earthquake in February 2023. sinkholes (which cannot easily be identified) and ground subsidence are also drivers of building collapse (WHO, 2019). Fire is another driver that can cause structural failure of steel and concrete buildings that can lead to the death of civilians and fire fighters (Meacham et al., 2010; Ahmadi et al., 2020). Additionally, coastal erosion (Fouad et al., 2025) and issues such building aging (Caredda et al., 2023) and heat island effects (Rotta, 2023) contribute to the risk of building collapse.

In many low- to middle-income countries building collapse has been attributed to weak foundations, substandard construction- al materials, poor material mixing by construction workers, excessive load on strength of buildings and poor testing of building strength (Figueroa Fernandez, 2014). Building collapse is also caused by structural failures, poor supervision and workmanship, faulty design and disregard for approved drawings (Windapo and Rotimi, 2012). Additional factors include absence of soil investigation before construction, lack of coordination between professional bodies and town planning authorities and inadequate enforcement of existing laws regulating physical development (Dimuna, 2010).

Terrorist activity may add additional hazards such as secondary devices, follow-on attack and residual radiological, biological or chemical contamination (cf HIPs BI0602 & CH0903). Historically, terrorist activities that have resulted in collapsed structures include crashing commercial jets into the World Trade Towers in New York City (11 September 2001) and vehicular bombs, such as the one used at the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City (19 April 1995) (OSHA, no date).

Impacts

The effects of building collapse include impacts on lives, livelihood and health, for example when asbestos is used in the building (cf HIP CH0202), as well as social, economic and environmental impacts (Babtunde, 2013). Since the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction launched its campaign kit for making cities resilient (UNDRR, 2010), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has been committed to making cities resilient and has engaged and published widely including sharing the ten essentials for making cities resilient (UNDRR, 2019). Engagement in this campaign is vital for enhancing the drivers for risk management with ‘Essential Four: Pursue Resilient Urban Development and Design’ which calls for integrating resilience into socio-economic development planning and infrastructure to safeguard development investments – which will help reduce the risks of building collapse (UNDRR, 2019). 

The consequences of failure vary significantly from structure to structure, and may depend on:  

• Nature of the hazard
• Properties of the structure
• Use/occupancy
• Location
• Time of day
• Time frame considered  

On 24 April 2013 the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh which housed five garment factories killed at least 1132 people and injured more than 2500 (ILO, no date). This was due to additional stories being built that ignored the approved construction permits (Hira and Benson-Rea, 2017). Only five months earlier, at least 112 workers had lost their lives in another accident, trapped inside the burning fashions factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Most of the factories do not meet the standards required by building and construction legislation. As a result, deaths from fire incidents and building collapses are frequent (ILO, no date).

Multi-hazard context

The figure below summarises common interactions between building collapse and other hazards. This information should be used with caution and not be solely relied upon in Disaster Risk Management, particularly as some interactions may not have been included. Note that hazardous events occurring together or locally in space or time may not necessarily cause, amplify, or be otherwise related to each other. Specific examples of multi-hazard context can be found in the ‘Hazard drivers’ and ‘Impacts’ sections above.

Multi-hazard diagram

Risk Management

To mitigate the effects of progressive or disproportionate collapse, a quantitative and transparent approach focuses on enhancing structural robustness. This ensures that both new and existing structures can prevent collapse under abnormal loads. Structural robustness depends on system characteristics (e.g., strength, ductility, redundancy) and the type of abnormal loading (e.g., dynamic, impulsive). While sometimes referred to as "structural integrity," the latter term specifically means the structure's wholeness after an extreme event. Structural robustness strongly depends on redundancy, which is the ability of the structure to redistribute loads after damage to a single or a few members. Risk is considered implicitly in design by most codes in Table 5 by means of the building classification and design methods recommended for each class or risk category. Risk considerations are also included in some codes in order to define the overall design strategy (EN 1991-1-7, NBCC 1995, ASCE/SEI 7-16, UFC 4-023-03, GSA 2013). A major drawback in many codes is that risk is not considered in a very transparent nor systematic way. The report on Building Regulation for Resilience – Managing risks for Safer Cities calls for mobilizing building code regulations for risk reduction (World Bank and GFDRR, 2026). 

Databases have particular value in identifying factors that give rise to disproportionate risk that only becomes clear from the analysis of larger scale data as distinct from individual cases. Carreda proposes a novel database of building collapses in which systematically collects information on the hazards, initial failures and their corresponding propagation mechanisms (Caressa et al, 2023). 

Monitoring

Monitoring in building failure is focusing on preventing malfunction by analysing anomalies in temperature control data. It can proactively optimize system performance, reduce downtime, and minimize the personal costs (Mesa-Jimenez et al., 2021). The physical parameters commonly used to provide early warnings of building collapse during a fire include frequency, temperature, acoustic waves, displacement, and displacement velocity. It is essential to detect these parameters in real-time to deliver early warnings effectively (Li et al., 2023).