On the 15th March, 1986, the Hotel New World in Singapore suffered a sudden and total collapse.
The disaster was followed by a massive rescue effort that lasted for four days and involved
over 500 personnel.
It was among the worst disasters the country had seen since the Second World War, and led
to widespread changes to building safety standards across the country.
The 1960s were a decade of great change for Singapore.
In 1963, after 144 years as a British Colony, Singapore became a state of Malaysia.
Then, just two years later, Singapore left Malaysia to become its own fully independent
state.
This period saw a huge boom in Singapore’s economy.
Between 1965 and 1970 the country’s GDP doubled.
Thousands of businesses were founded and thrived in this new, independent Singapore.
At the same time, the Singaporean government was working hard to attract tourists to the
country.
Ad campaigns were run in the US, Australia and Japan – and they were resoundingly successful.
Between 1970 and 1977, the number of tourists visiting Singapore tripled.
It was in this period that the Hotel New World was conceived and constructed.
It was a six-storey structure, initially known as the New Sarangoon Hotel.
It kept this name until 1984 when it became the Hotel New World.
Despite this name, it wasn’t just a hotel.
The ground floor was home to a commercial bank, while the second floor was home to the
Universal Neptune Night Club and Restaurant.
An underground car park was built into the basement, while the roof was occupied by several
pieces of heavy equipment: water tanks, water heaters, cooling towers and the condensing
units of the building’s air conditioning system.
For the most part business was good at the Hotel New World…
although it did experience a difficult year in 1975.
In August of this year a carbon monoxide leak caused 35 guests to be hospitalised, though
fortunately there were no deaths or serious injuries.
Between this incident and the eventual collapse of the building in 1986, no significant structural
issues were reported.
Staff and guests went about their lives with no concern for the integrity of the building
they occupied.
In the days leading up to the 15th of March, 1986, cracks began appearing in columns, walls
and floors through the building.
Several occupants were concerned by these, but were quickly reassured when workmen were
sent in to patch up the cracks.
The tenants of the building had no way of knowing that these cracks were more than just
cosmetic.
In fact, several support columns had already failed at this point in time, leading to more
weight being piled on to the remaining intact columns.
Over the course of two days residents heard loud cracking sounds, and noticed more visible
cracks and debris falling from the ceiling of the underground parking garage.
One passer-by later claimed to have felt a small earthquake as they walked past the building
during this time.
At 11:25am on the 15th of March, the Hotel New World collapsed completely.
The fall of the building lasted only seconds – during those seconds a six-storey building,
became a massive pile of rubble, with no single column or wall left standing.
At the time of the collapse, approximately fifty people were inside the building.
Of these fifty, those who had survived the collapse were now trapped beneath layers of
concrete and other rubble.
Within minutes of the building’s failure, the first two fire engines arrived.
Passers-by were already working at the rubble, digging for survivors, and within half an
hour they were joined by a large contingent of regulars and volunteers of the SCDF, the
Singapore Civil Defence Force, as well as medical personnel from the Singapore Armed
Forces.
Rescue attempts began right away, with several early success stories.
A tourist who had been staying on one of the top floors of the building was pulled from
the rubble after just a few hours.
A staff member was also rescued from high up in the rubble with only minor injuries.
While these early rescues were promising, retrieving people who were trapped lower down
in the rubble proved more challenging.
Heavy machinery, including cranes and diggers, were used to cut through the rubble in search
of survivors… but this approach risked causing the rubble to shift and crush those still
trapped beneath.
Expert engineers from all over the world were present in Singapore, overseeing the construction
of the Mass Rapid Transit subway system.
A group of these expert engineers warned that using heavy machinery was dangerous.
Instead, they volunteered to tunnel down to survivors, making use of existing underground
ventilation shafts to expedite their progress.
It was an incredibly risky operation.
Rescue teams used seismic life detectors to hone in on any movement beneath the rubble.
As they passed through what remained of the basement car park of the building they noted
that crushed cars had spilled a large quantity of petrol into the debris, meaning that any
tiny spark could ignite a fatal fire.
In these challenging conditions the engineers and rescuers painstakingly tunnelled towards
the likely location of survivors.
They used high pressure water jets to cut through debris, and hydraulic jacks to hold
up the rubble above their heads.
Even working slowly and carefully, they were forced to abandon their first tunnel and start
again from scratch after narrowly escaping a cave in.
Undeterred, they cut several more tunnels through the rubble, eventually breaking through
to several pockets of survivors.
The process took days, and many rescuers worked without breaks to reach injured survivors
in time.
On March 19th, the rescue operation was brought to an end.
Over the course of four days, everyone who had been in the building was accounted for.
Seventeen survivors had been extracted from the rubble, along with the 33 bodies of people
who had been killed in the collapse.
A week after the collapse, President Wee Kim Wee created a commission to investigate the
cause.
The report took almost a year to put together, and produced some concerning findings.
Due to the speed at which the building collapsed, it was initially believed that the cause may
have been a bomb.
However, after engineers examined the rubble, no evidence of an explosion was found, and
so this theory was ruled out.
The concrete used within the building was tested too, but all samples were found to
meet international safety standards.
The possibility that substandard materials had been used was also ruled out – as was
the quality of the foundations and the stability of the land on which the building had been
located.
It was only when investigators examined the building’s original designs that they discovered
the cause of the building’s collapse.
It was found that the two draughtsmen who’d drawn up the structural plans for the building
were both unqualified, and had made a fatal error in their designs.
In this case they had accounted for the live load the building would experience: the weight
of all the people, furniture and other fixtures that would occupy the building when it was
in use.
However, the dead load – the weight of the building itself – had not been accounted
for.
By not including the dead load in their calculations, the draughtsmen had vastly underestimated
the weight that the building would have to support.
Because of this basic error, most of the support columns within the building were extremely
close to failure from the day construction was completed.
Over the years extra weight had been added in the form of new air conditioning units,
new cladding, and even a strong room for use by the bank on the ground floor, pushing the
already over-stressed columns past the point of failure.
This was what caused the support columns to begin cracking in the days leading up to the
disaster, and what had ultimately lead to the collapse of the Hotel New World.
Following the investigation, the government of Singapore mandated that the plans for all
new public and private buildings in the country would be checked by an independent expert.
Many buildings constructed around the same time as the Hotel New World were inspected.
A small number were found to be unsafe, and were quickly evacuated, demolished and rebuilt.
The site of the Hotel New World itself was cleared, and a new building – the Fortuna
Hotel – was opened there in 1994.
In addition to this, the Singapore Civil Defence Force and emergency services were allocated
more funding for equipment and training, to ensure that any similar disasters in future
could be handled as efficiently and safely as possible.
The families of those who died in the collapse each received S$24,000, and a relief scheme
of more than S$900,000 was set up for the children of the victims.
The volunteers who risked their lives to tunnel through the rubble and rescue survivors were
honoured by the Singaporean government with awards for their bravery.
The collapse of the Hotel New World prompted a rapid change in policy.
While these changes cannot help the 33 people who lost their lives in the collapse, they
do at least lessen the likelihood of another similar disaster.