BOOM! There Goes The Largest Billboard In Vegas

I could swear I wrote or read about the Harmon in Las Vegas being structurally unsound last year, but maybe that was just rumor and my mind playing tricks on me. Well, now multiple reports have been published about the Harmon’s instability and the fact that it may come down in event of an earthquake.

The unfinished Harmon hotel tower at CityCenter on the Las Vegas Strip would likely collapse in a strong earthquake, a structural engineer told casino operator MGM Resorts International on Monday.

The report sent to the casino company by Weidlinger Associates of Marina del Rey, Calif., says it would take at least one year to figure out what kind of repairs would be required to save the tower.

“In a code-level earthquake, using either the permitted or current code specified loads, it is likely that critical structural members in the tower will fail and become incapable of supporting gravity loads, leading to a partial or complete collapse of the tower,” said Chukwuma G. Ekwueme, an associated principal of Weidlinger.

OK, nothing new here. So the Harmon is no longer going to be a huge billboard because it’s probably less expensive to tear it down than to fix. So what will go in its place? There’s nothing that really makes sense to go there at the moment. Maybe a park until the economy gets better? A park will probably stop people from walking into the Cosmopolitan and shouldn’t slow down foot traffic into Crystals since that’s almost non-existent anyway.

This whole scenario reminds me about Brad Pitt walking into Al Pacino‘s office at The Bank in Oceans 13 warning him about a potential earthquake. In fact, that movie is probably on TV somewhere right now. I’d rather be watching that than most things.