Exclusive | Buckling building in Midtown NYC will face partial demolition but even stabilizing it beforehand will be highly risky: experts

The Midtown high-rise that dangerously buckled Tuesday will need to be partially demolished — although stabilizing it to even attempt the risky move could prove extremely harrowing, experts told The Post.The 37-story former Pfizer headquarters at 235 E.42nd St.

near Second Avenue will first need to be stabilized as soon as possible to prevent a possible localized collapse, they said.Without intervention, it poses a “significant danger” and “could collapse,” said Ronald Hamburger, a structural engineer with five decades of experience and who served on the federal team that investigated the World Trade Center catastrophe.He noted that the under-construction building’s buckled columns on several of its floors are now only holding about a third of the load they were designed for — leaving the intact other beams and columns “highly stressed.”Engineers will need to install brackets on the columns in the floor below the failed columns to re-level the structure and ease the load on the intact infrastructure, he said.Workers also will have to replace the failed columns — though the stabilization can only be done after experts assess the safety of the building, as well as the design of the new columns.“It should be done rapidly, it can’t be done immediately,” he said.“Engineers are going to need to go in and assess just how far the damage has progressed.“It should be possible to do the repair within a week, stabilizing it, then going about the structural repair,’’ he said.But Emily Guglielmo, a structural engineer and principal at Martin/Martin, noted that even getting engineers inside the building for stabilization will prove to be a risky effort.“If it’s possible, in order to limit further evacuation life safety concerns, the quickest fix is to try to get that temporary bracing and shoring in there,” she said, adding it will be a “balancing act” of whether personnel can safely get inside to put supports in “or it’s just too ...