For all the craziness this weekend, nothing has been more tragic than the collapse of a condominium in South Florida. Via Laurel Wamsley at NPR:
There are now 159 people unaccounted for in the partial building collapse in Surfside, Fla., Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Friday — a rise from 99 people a day earlier.
Three more bodies were found in the rubble, bringing the number of fatalities so far to four. More than 100 people have already been accounted for...
"We will continue search and rescue because we still have hope that we will find people alive," Levine Cava said. "That is why we are using our dogs and our sonar and our cameras — everything possible to seek places where there may still be people to be found..."
She said that people evacuated from the building are being provided food, shelter, cash to assist with their basic needs and grief counseling at a family reunification center, where families and friends can await any news of their loved ones.
President Biden approved an emergency declaration on Friday morning authorizing the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief efforts.
The cause of the building's sudden collapse early Thursday morning remains unclear...
One pattern emerging is that the 40-year-old building (from 1981) was showing signs of aging out and becoming a risk. Back to NPR, with reporting from Matthew S Schwartz and Brian Mann:
A structural engineering report provided to the Champlain Towers condominium association in 2018 found widespread problems that required extensive repairs "in the near future."
The consulting group that wrote the report noted Saturday that the document "detailed significant cracks and breaks in the concrete, which required repairs to ensure the safety of the residents and the public..."
The engineering report, dated Oct. 8, 2018, includes pictures of cracks in the concrete columns of Champlain Towers South. The report found "major structural damage" to the concrete structural slab below the pool deck, caused by waterproofing that was "beyond its useful life" and needed a complete replacement.
It warned that "failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially."
The nine-page report, authored by Morabito Consultants, listed several areas of concern with the now 40-year-old building. The main issue was that the concrete slab was flat, rather than sloped in order to drain off water. That means any water simply sits on the waterproofing until it evaporates...
Sticking in my mind is the statement from the husband of a woman who called the night of the disaster while he was in DC on business. His wife was panicking about the condo shaking, and that the swimming pool had disappeared into a sinkhole... before the line went dead. She's still among the missing.
Any further reading into the Champlain Towers will point out how it was built atop reclaimed wetlands, which is not the sturdiest ground to build on. That a local Florida International University professor who studies these things had found the building was sinking (although he'll establish that effect wouldn't have been the direct cause of the collapse).
And as someone who's lived in Florida almost all my life - having witnessed the rise of the state population from the 1980s onward and the massive development of condo towers, business complexes, luxury hotels, and other massive buildings up and down the entire peninsular coast between New Port Richey to Jacksonville - let me note that this is likely the beginning of all those big towers falling.
Any decent study of Florida history will tell you that the Sunshine State has been home to massive overdevelopment of coastal lands, as well as propping up suburb after suburb alongside shopping malls atop swampy ecosystems that were needed to handle flooding issues (especially from the annual hurricane seasons). It doesn't help that a lot of that construction over the years of growth - I would argue late 60s as the start date when air conditioning made it more comfortable to live in Florida, as well as the Space Race and tourism making Central Florida a business mecca - was shoddy, questionable, and prone to collapse. Hurricane Andrew's visit in 1992 exposed a lot of those sins... and yet for all the talk about improvements to the building codes, there's still a lot of short-cuts and cost-cutting going on that leaves a lot to be desired.
We're coming up to the 40-year mark of the early rounds of massive development across Florida, all these buildings just as old as Champlain Towers if not older: Many of them likely cracking from years of erosion, or aging out of questionable construction materials lacking in the rebar or other reinforcements to help keep things up.
That warning report was in 2018. There doesn't seem to be any sign that the building management or homeowners' association was acting on that report by the time of this disaster. They were apparently getting another cost evaluation done a few days before this happened. A serious sign of foot-dragging on something that turned out required a lot more urgency.
Ever drive along the Florida coast? Especially South Florida, the exotic jewel of the Caribbean waters? I lived down there for about 9 years, mid-90s, as more construction was going on. Nearly every inch of the Atlantic coast had towers, massive skyscrapers, high-value property overlooking the ocean, some of the most beautiful vistas in the world (if you could see any of it past the towers). A lot of them built right on the edge, crowding out any sandy shores of beachfront... and all of it sinking into that ocean as the sea levels keep rising.
This Sunshine State has been living high on the constant development of land into businesses and residences (and almost all of it high-value, nothing for the low-income families still struggling to find apartment space). All of that construction and yet no care or concern of the long-term impacts we're only now starting to see. The powers-that-be wanted all this development but don't want to spend any money to renovate, upgrade or repair.
What worries me is how this isn't all new: We've been getting warnings for decades that all this overdevelopment was going to bite us, and we've been getting warnings the last five-ten years that we need to start repairing all the places we have before it gets too late.
And now it's getting too late.
I am so sorry so many lives had to disappear like this for our state to get one more warning sign.
1 comment:
Reminds me a little of when the earthquake knocked the Cypress structure down. That thing was old and sagging and they kept just resurfacing it when the lumps got too large to ignore, adding more and more weight to it. Now all the freeways down there have been retrofitted or replaced entirely, and they look so much different than the old clunky construction that was the Cypress structure that one can drive on them with a bit more confidence.
I still get nervous sitting underneath any of them at red lights, though, I was down there and saw what the Cypress structure did when it collapsed.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Post a Comment