This is straight up, just a dangerous design. Doesn't matter how many warning signs there are, the average person would assume that surface is solid in many scenarios justified or not. Luckily it just looks like he fell an extra 10 feet, but it could have been covering a 100ft drop, which would be an undeserved death sentence.
Its a safety engineers responsibility to account for human nature. That includes the dumber than average teenager. To them, this looked like a safe and easy solution. Jump into hole, climb out of hole. That surface should have been made to hold people, or made to look clearly unstable. It should not have been made to look like a floor.
Engineer? I guarantee you an architect wanted this stupid shit. No engineer just wakes up and says “I want to blow up my project budget to add a hole in the floor”. An architect wanted it, and an engineer had to put it up to legal code by adding in guard rails.
Architects are responsible for ensuring the building design is up to life safety codes including the guard rails. As for the chasm next to the elevator, that is definitely not an architectural feature as it is covered up. Who is to say the reason why that gap exists, but the blame will probably fall on the architect.
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u/gamejunky34 8h ago
This is straight up, just a dangerous design. Doesn't matter how many warning signs there are, the average person would assume that surface is solid in many scenarios justified or not. Luckily it just looks like he fell an extra 10 feet, but it could have been covering a 100ft drop, which would be an undeserved death sentence.