I suspect this article re the collapse of the CTV building in the Christchurch (NZ) earthquake might just have something to do with it:
THE PANCAKE EFFECT
All that remained of the CTV Building was the north wall and its lift shaft and stairwell complex, which loomed as a scarred and snarling tower over the carnage.
Of the 185 people killed in the February 22 earthquake, two-thirds – 115 people – perished in this one relatively modern building that had been designed only 25 years earlier by the firm of Alan Reay, one of the country’s most prominent structural engineers.
A small number of people emerged miraculously alive from the collapse. The bodies of four people were so damaged they were never recovered. Two 19-year-old Japanese students subsequently had legs amputated. Those who died were from China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Turkey and Christchurch. Seventy-one of the dead were students from Kings Education and nine were staff from the school.
No other building failed so catastrophically that day – not even the PGC Building, in which 18 people died; not the hundreds of unreinforced masonry buildings long known to be a serious earthquake risk; not even the red-stickered building in Gloucester St from which The Clinic had been forced to relocate.
The CTV Building had pancaked in a manner that left the occupants with little or no chance of survival.
(Quote from this article )