In Surfside, Fla., four people are known dead and 159 are still missing after the collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South. on Thursday. Madeleine Romanello, a Realtor with listings in the building, said Thursday, “The building was in okay shape … They were just starting repairs to upgrade.”
A 2018 engineer’s report cited in the New York Times, however, found “’major structural damage’ to the concrete slab below the pool deck and ‘abundant’ cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage …”
A multimillion dollar repair project was scheduled to begin soon when two and a half years later the building pancaked without warning. The city released that report on Friday indicating damage caused perhaps by years of exposure to salt air and water intrusion:
“Though some of this damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion,” the consultant, Frank Morabito, wrote about damage near the base of the structure as part of his October 2018 report on the 40-year-old building in Surfside, Fla. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of collapse, though he noted that the needed repairs would be aimed at “maintaining the structural integrity” of the building and its 136 units.
[…]
“Abundant cracking and spalling of varying degrees was observed in the concrete columns, beams, and walls,”Mr. Morabito wrote. He included photos of cracks in the columns of the parking garage as well as concrete crumbling — a process engineers refer to as “spalling” — that exposed steel reinforcements on the garage deck.
Prior repairs to cracks were failing. Concrete on many balconies was also deteriorating
After watching a surveillance video showing the collapse of the building, Evan Bentz, a professor at the University of Toronto and an expert in structural concrete, said that whatever had caused the collapse would have to have been somewhere near the bottom of the building, perhaps around the parking level. Though he had not seen the 2018 report at the time, he said such a collapse could have several possible explanations, including a design mistake, a materials problem, a construction error or a maintenance error.
“I’d be surprised if there was just one cause,” Mr. Bentz said. “There would have to be multiple causes for it to have fallen like that.”
Although this tragedy was not a public property, the collapse speaks nevertheless to the infrastructure talks going on in Washington, D.C. Bridges, highways, and other infrastructure in this country are deteriorating and in dire need of repair or replacement. People who have lectured for decades about personal responsibility and that there is no free lunch nonetheless fight to cut taxes and limit funding for maintaining infrastructure our forebaers built. Yet, they expect it to be there for them … safe and intact, for free.
How many years have structural engineers been warning us?
