I debated paging this, but I haven’t been able to find the actual report yet. I know we had some discussion here after the Moore tornado regarding the decision to keep kids at the school and reasons behind that decision making process, so to read this …hurt.

Moore tornado debris reveals construction flaws, code violations

“(At Briarwood) we found one horizontal steel beam that was designed as a support beam for masonry over the entrance to two classrooms,” Ramseyer said. “But there was no connection from the beam to the masonry, anywhere. No connection. The beam was just sitting there on the walls. Only gravity held it in place. Obviously, that’s not being built to code.”

Ramseyer, who also serves as director of the university’s Donald G. Fears Structural Engineering Lab, is one of the authors of the ASCE-SEI report. He was part of the eight-person ASCE team sent to Moore just days after the May 20 storm and charged with examining debris to see what construction techniques did and did not work.

With support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Ramseyer and the ASCE group were allowed to examine and photograph rubble from the school.

He said debris from the Briarwood site showed many of school’s walls were built using only short, 4- to 8-inch vertical overlaps of steel reinforcement - rebar - inside the cinder-block cells.

The International Building Code for reinforced masonry requires cinder blocks used in walls to be backfilled with concrete and to be reinforced with rebar overlaps between 20 and 30 inches long.