CityCenter appeals order that could delay demolition of Harmon tower
CityCenter has asked the Nevada Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that could delay demolition of the flawed Harmon hotel tower and a trial over defects in the structure.
CityCenter filed an emergency motion Thursday asking the court to overturn a July ruling by Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez that CityCenter couldn’t use extrapolation techniques to prove its claim the Harmon is riddled with defects and is unsafe.
CityCenter said its structural engineering expert, Gary Hart, evaluated 397 of the Harmon’s critical structural elements and found all but one defective. The elements selected included components of Hart’s choosing “based on their centrality to the whole building’s structural performance under gravity, wind and earthquake loads,” CityCenter attorneys said in the motion.
“He then used his 40-year expertise to infer (i.e. extrapolate) that another 1,072 related, untested structural components” were defective, the CityCenter motion said.
But, CityCenter complained, Gonzalez “has ruled that this extrapolation testimony is not admissible because the 397 test locations examined by Hart were not chosen by a process of random selection.”
The larger issue, CityCenter said, is that the issue of randomness and selecting what elements to test in buildings in defect cases is of “fundamental public importance with the potential of being repeated in future commercial construction defect cases.”
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