Originally published at: Footage of crumbling tower basement garage shot before collapse | Boing Boing
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The colossal amount of finger pointing hasn’t even started yet. Has there even been an update from the HOA yet?
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From what I’ve heard, many of the HOA board members are among the missing.
10 years into this ‘camera in every pocket’ smartphone phenomenon, I’m still amazed when videos like this pop up.
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Who is actually responsible though… the HOA ? They decide on repairs… but unless they have smart people, might not understand the gravity of a bad engineering report. Seems like people in-the-know might be under all that indecision.
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In order to gain property insurance, yearly the HOA is required to fully disclose any and all issues with the said HOA, that’s physical and financial in nature. I’d bet good money they were hiding the structural issues from the insurance company, and the insurance company will flog that in court, and likely win.
P.S. I run HOA’s as my part time employ, it’s thankless beyond words, but put’s some spending cash in the kitty monthly…
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I’ve watched that video five times over, and I can’t see a damn thing. Maybe tiktok’s banners and the emoji centered on the video are distracting my eyes.
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This speaks against the theory that the pool was the trigger as the ramp (shown in the video) was on the opposite side of the building per some schematic plans I’ve seen online. Wish I could find them now to share.
Though they aren’t annotated.
Tried to get a zoomed in screenshot - video shows some concrete rubble and a single falling stream of water visible behind the gate.:
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That’s not what I’d seen before but the set found at that link called “preliminary-review-plans-for-40-year-re-certification” shows on sheet A2C-1.0 (page 4) what I recall. The ramp shown in this video (at plan-North, which I think corresponds to real north) is FAR from the pool (plan SE, at corner).
That set of documents is fascinating. Prepared by Morabito, the author of the now-famous report of 2018, it provides for a pretty extensive set of repairs. I’ll have to leaf through to understand it better but my first glimpse says that they knew of some serious problems and were headed towards repairing them. It remains to be seen if the scope of repairs would have gotten to the point that failed.
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Probably why a review of older structures was ordered:
With developers of single family homes in the news for stucco construction scandals going back 9-10 years, the attempts to avoid insurance costs doesn’t surprise me. That seems to be more of a motivator than building codes and safety standards.
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Not a PE, but played structural engineer in Afghanistan a few years, wonder why people are pointing such fingers at the engineers and building managers, and not the Florida karst sinkhole phenomenon or the earthquake the US Navy set off off the coast of Florida a day or two before?
*edit: followed up more on reports, expensive repairs were proposed which residents rejected…but still, the mode of failure seems more extreme than a rebar failure would cause. Tension failures in concrete are generally slow. 40 kiloton blast off the coast 3 days before… just saying.
Florida is a very long state-- as anyone who has traveled it by car will attest. Ponce inlet is nowhere near Miami. The explosion took place on 18 june, the tower collapsed on 24 june, more than a few days.
As for karst, Miami is in area I-- few sinkholes
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Appreciate the geology clarification, and yup, looks like that quake was way too far away.
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This article describes how there was apparently less rebar than expected tying the pool deck into the columns:
If the builder was trying to cut corners and not follow the plans by using less steel, that would be disappointing but not surprising.
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“There does not appear to be enough steel connecting the slab to the columns,” Mr. Nair said. “What we see out there seems inconsistent with what the drawings show.”
sort of reminds me of the Hyatt Regency collapse, in that the original plans did not reflect how the walkway was actually built. (Though, in that case, even the original plans weren’t up to code)
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This video attempts to explain a lot.
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