I first realized that America had become a third-world nation back in 2008 when the Baxter heparin fiasco made the news. Our infrastructure is woefully underfunded, we responded poorly to a major pandemic, a mob attempted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, and now a shocking collapse of a residential building with an unknown number of dead. Does that sound like a well-functioning nation state to you?

Pool decks are usually the concrete slabs around pools – but I have seen pools on upper floors, generally in buildings with high prices for residences, and I wouldn’t live in one of those structures. And how the #$%^&*!! the architect missed things like grading for slope away from the building, and heavy-duty waterproofing of everything around the pools and the garage entrance, is beyond me.

Also it took 17 HOURS for DeSantis to get to a disaster declaration. His border thing was apparently much more important. (The WH was ready within two hours of the collapse.)

If the water is coming up from below–either sea level rise or wicking from elevated groundwater– sooner or later the rebar in those slabs is going to rust, the slabs will lose their integrity, and the buildings will fall. In a state where cities such as Miami have line items in their budgets for pumping seawater, rain, or both off of submerged streets, it’s amazing that their public policy excludes elimination of carbon emissions. “Climate change” that’s just commie talk from people people who hate freedom.

Undeterred by all manner of calamity wrought by the human animal, Cabal asks…”All the universe or nothing…which shall it be?”
https://youtu.be/KRRXtymX50U

I certainly hope there is an aggressive investigation. I have a number of friends in the Orthodox community, and to a man they believe the building was targeted by Hamas as a retribution for the most recent Gaza war. Much of this is based on the video circulating that shows the facade falling in ways that are reminiscent of some of the Gaza, and the building had a very robust Jewish population. While it is always expected that people will make allowances for the unthinkable, and try to give a context that makes more sense than someone screwed up in the 80’s and beyond, I fear that this may be a fertile opportunity for the Governor in a community he clearly covets. The faster that a clear reason is proven is not soon enough, but the potential cratering of a red, red hot market scares DeSantis more than anything. If hinting a terror connection befell Champlain Towers, rather than the (probable) notion that 40 years of waterfront condos may have equal danger and may then have to be evacuated or subject to extensive repair keeps real estate sales humming, along with being perceived as a protector of the Jewish community, I wouldn’t put it past him if the investigation drags.

As someone who was born in Miami and have lived in Florida all my life, I have witnessed the constant threats that unrestrained growth and money have inflicted on our citizens. From salt water intrusion to wetland destruction, this has been going on for decades. It has just gotten worse over time with sea level rise, coastal armoring, wetland destruction, dredging and filling, toxic algae blooms, the list goes on.

The Florida Legislature attempted to address some of the problems we were facing decades ago through the enactment of a Growth Management Law, coastal construction setback standards, environmental land purchases and others. But this willingness to deal with difficult issues and powerful special interest didn’t last long. There was a time when Florida had a number of elected officials who cared about the state, not just money and power. And yes, it was a combination of Republicans and Democrats. But this all changed over time and money won. Basically what we are seeing today will eventually destroy us unless we begin to elect people who are willing to recognize the gravity of the problem and protect our citizens.

Here is a question that is major yet I haven’t seen discussed in the context of climate change and everything that goes with it. When the most expensive real estate in a state like Florida becomes a total loss, who pays for it? Hurricane Andrew demonstrated that even insurance carriers with huge amounts of money could face claims they couldn’t pay. What we are facing now makes Andrew look not that catastrophic after all. I can’t even imagine the amount of losses that will be suffered and no one, not even the feds, has the money for that. It is simply staggering. And I am only considering Florida, not other coastal states.

I can’t say the collapse of this condo was that much of a surprise. Building codes in Dade are on paper, fairly strict. However, It is a place that has a long history of politicians and bureaucrats with their hands out.

Plus, we have a property tax system that rewards maximum development (no matter where) over public safety and quality of life issues. Now with the arrival of climate change, it is past time to rethink how we view property rights and the interests of society.

I’m not going to speculate on the cause of the failure here. It is, most likely, a combination of things that came together in one bad moment.

I will speak a bit from my own experience, as a B.S. Civ. E., former geotechnical field engineer (that’s soils and foundations – building and fixing), and having done more than a bit of construction litigation after that. I also grew up in an area of karst geology and know a bit about sinkholes and associated failures.

1. A failure of the bedrock (sinkhole/collapse) under the building might, or might not, have compromised the foundation such that the building collapsed. Assuming there was one, how deep below the building was any collapse? The deeper, the less it would affect the building because the foundation loads spread out with increasing depth. Assuming there was one, how big was it (in plan view, i.e., from above)? The more area, the more it would affect the building.

2. Just because something is built on filled land (i.e., soil/rock brought in and placed to raise or adjust the surface topography) does not mean it’s inherently unstable, weak or prone to fail. Filled land is distinct from “landfill”, i.e., a garbage dump. You can, in fact, successfully and safely build on landfill if you do it right, “doing it right” being a topic beyond the scope of this comment. Yes, parts of lower Manhattan, SF, and who knows where else are built on filled land. If either you clean out the swamp muck first (it’s usually a swamp that someone wants to convert to office space) or bury it under lots and lots of clean fill (boulders down to sand – with a nice mix of sizes so all the voids are filled in) or you run pilings deep into the fill (pilings usually are not held in place by resting their end on something solid way down but rather stay put because of friction applied to their sides by the soil they’re driven into), you can get a solid base upon which to build the building. It costs money, time, engineering skill and compliance with sound practice both in design and execution.

3. One of the things my professors stressed was KISS – keep it simple, stupid – because the guys doing the actual work are … stupid/illiterate, and/or care in direct proportion to the amount they’re paid, DGAS, or no comprende. Or some combination. It takes little to no reading ability to swing a shovel, wire rebar, pour concrete. Frankly, for a lot of those jobs intelligence is a handicap – they are insanely boring.

So these guys are not the brightest bulbs and in more ways than you can count. I was sharing a drink last night with a friend who is a VP of a construction company and was previously a construction superintendent. He related about a project he supervised some years back, to rehabilitate the cafeteria in a county jail in a southern state where he formerly lived. All his workers – painters, electricians, laborers, plumbers, supervisors – had to be cleared in advance to work inside the jail. The county was not going to let the inmates go while they re-did the cafeteria. He related how, as the workers entered he watched his crews having some workers sent the one way and some the other. It turned out he lost between half and 2/3 of his crews because the ones lost were sieved out by the jail because they had outstanding warrants for child support, traffic tickets, you name it. And, of course, the jailers would not let these new inmates work. These workers were so stupid they went reported for work at a jail despite having outstanding warrants.

I have little doubt the work on this building was average at best. Which is to say it passed inspection.

4. I cannot tell whether the rebar – a lot of it pulled right out of the concrete and is hanging on the sides of the building – was properly installed and wired in or welded in, in the first place. Nor can I tell whether there was enough rebar, properly placed, or anything else about it. That’s something forensic engineers will spend no small amount of time poring over. Nor can I tell whether the rebar was epoxy-coated or uncoated. My recollection is that epoxy-coated rebar was just coming into wide use in the industry in the early to mid-80s. Epoxy-coated rebar tends to resist corrosion far better than uncoated. Uncoated rebar (and any reinforcing steel) will expand when it corrodes/rusts. That will crack the concrete around it. And things only go downhill from there.

But we do not know whether any of that took place. It will take a lot of forensic engineering to determine that.

5. Concrete is another place where the work could have been good, bad, or indifferent. One feels safe in assuming the concrete work itself was up to spec – obvious problems would have been visible no later than the time the forms came off (40 years ago). What we don’t (and, given the devastation probably never will) know is the degree to which the concrete may have deteriorated since completion. The short version is that concrete and salt water, salt spray and salt air do not get along. The chloride ion (from salt) attacks and weakens concrete, turning it into crumbles. It’s beyond my knowledge (and probably anyone’s at this point in time) to determine whether any of the concrete was so affected, where it was, how critical it was (if any was affected) and if it had anything to do with the collapse. Something to watch for but, again, forensic engineering has to take place first.

6. Corner-cutting. On every project, corners are cut. Oftentimes, it’s something that facilitates quicker construction and results in no less safety.

Right now, the overwhelming likelihood is that there are about 150-160 dead people in the remains of that building. Their bodies need to be recovered, their lives mourned, and the forensics take place to determine why what happened, happened. I am inclined to doubt there will be enough insurance coverage to pay decent amounts to their survivors, even after dragging in every conceivable potential defendant. The people who were not in the collapsed area will need new housing (and the opportunity to get their stuff out, itself a touchy operation). Their homes are worthless now. Same for the people in the adjoining twin building.

We are an office of architects in NY – not structural engineers or geotech so not experts by any means. But as we all watched the video Friday morning in stunned horror, I would say everyone muttered basically the same thing; foundation failure. Massive foundation failure. You couldn’t demolish the building any faster. What a gut wrenching tragedy – horrible.

For what it’s worth, and at this point nothing, it looked to us as if a major structural element somewhere in foundation gave way, suddenly. Maybe a footing on which a column rested could no longer support it’s load, or a subgrade footing/column buckled or sank dramtically. Immediately we thought the subsoil may have been undermined. I felt sure loud noises must have been audible only hours or a day prior to collapse, and large visible cracks unique to this event must have appeared at the pressure point shortly before. Alas, not enough time or in a visible enough area for these signs to literally scare people out of the building.

Again, we’re not experts, and it may well have been a pancake effect from top down as some observers have suggested. But our 10-second gut judgement was it was more than salt/steel/concrete deterioration to above grade construction that lead to failure, but foundation related – a subsoil event or compound deterioration effects in the foundation.

One thing is certain. Unless the disaster can be traced back to a design flaw or construction defect entirely unique to this building, it’s the beginning of a new era. One of far more frequent and aggressive mandated inspections of existing structures, and an industry wide reappraisal of the methods of construction and margins of safety in stuctural design on barrier islands and similar topography.

Kudos to the town of Surfside for posting detailed documents:
https://www.townofsurfsidefl.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/town-clerk-documents/champlain-towers-south-public-records/8777-collins-avenue—preliminary-review-plans-for-40-year-re-certification.pdf?sfvrsn=9e2a1194_2

With global warming, coastal areas around the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to these kinds of disasters.

Infrastructure will end up more and more like Netherlands every where. What then will Netherland’s infrastructure become?

To recap the basic narrative, as a building material, concrete goes back millenia. The Romans made great use of it, for example, but their recipe was lost. Its reinvention required rediscovering what materials make good cement and what ratios of water, cement, and aggregate give the desired characteristics. (These have since been minutely catalogued.)

Its American history starts with and made possible the construction in the 1820s of the Erie Canal. It’s basically a concrete-lined ditch, interspersed with locks, that runs downhill from Lake Erie at Buffalo to the Hudson at Albany. (Until then, it was 20x cheaper to send goods down the Ohio and Mississippi river system to New Orleans, then by sea to NYC, than to transport them across the Alleghenies.)

Concrete has been called liquid rock. It can be poured into almost any shape, but once cured, it becomes tough and rigid. Structural concrete, however, needs uniform shape, integrity, and reinforcement to add resilience and to evenly transfer loads – both static (the weight of a building), and dynamic (wind and moving water).

Loads change and impact a small portion of a concrete structure – the surface area of loadbearing walls on a slab or the tire path along a roadway – and must be distributed evenly to the foundation. Uniform shape, a consistent thickness and firm foundation, for example, are essential. Lose one or more of these through damage or decay – holes, rusted rebar – and structural forces will wear away at the weakness, like water worming its way through fissures in Johnstown’s earthen dam, until it fails.

So go ahead and accuse me of being Captain Obvious but there is nothing very unusual about this building and, therefore, can we not presume seawater to be penetrating the concrete of every structure on Miami Beach at the same pace depending on elevation and mediation measures taken?

[“Less than three”] Months before the building’s collapse, a condo official warned that damage had ‘gotten significantly worse’ in recent years.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/30/us/miami-condo-building-collapse-updates#surfside-building-collapse-warning-letter 6/30/21

[…]“When you can visually see the concrete spalling (cracking), that means that the rebar holding it together is rusting and deteriorating beneath the surface,” Ms. Wodnicki wrote.

She explained that these signs of growing damage were why the estimated costs of repair had jumped by some 60 percent since that 2018 inspection. “The concrete deterioration is accelerating. The roof situation got much worse,” she wrote, adding, “New problems have been identified.”

“A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by,” she wrote in the letter. “But this is where we are now.” […]

READ THE DOCUMENT [No date shown on this letter]:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/29/us/champlain-towers-south-condo-letter.html