Miami building collapse: Letter in April warned of worsening damage
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The engineer in 2008 warned that the damage would increase "exponentially." The engineer from the 2018 report was put in charge of overseeing the repairs in 2019; and it seems like the repairs were planned, moving slowly. How much of this 3 year delay is because of HOA politics?
There was some indication that the damage was potentially worse than it appeared:
>Also, when performing any concrete restoration work, it is impossible to know the extent of the damage to the underlying rebar until the concrete is opened up. Oftentimes the damage is more extensive than can be determined by inspection of the surface.
Does this letter demonstrate negligence by the engineering firm? If the damage was that bad should the firm have contacted the city? Did the residents contribute to the delay?
A haunting quote:
> A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by. But this is where we are now.
The letter from April:
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/miamiletter0628...
HOA politics may have been part of it, but it was probably simpler. It was going to cost a lot of money, and people tend to fight large assessments.
The bigger HOA failure sounds like 40 years of poor maintenance. There are reports of a similar building nearby that was maintained, and it shows none of the same problems.
If a condo block will need work costing $100,000 per unit after 40 years, what's the proper way of financing that?
Does the HOA start saving up for it from year 1 by charging a hefty management fee? Do they rely on every homeowner being able to come up with $100,000 on demand? Do they just assume they won't be around in 40 years so it's someone else's problem?
I've never really heard a satisfactory answer to that, which is one of the reasons I don't own a condo.
But at the same time for a single family home, it is not unusual to invest 100k in a remodel if the location supports it on a 40 year old house. A condo should operate similarly although the scope of changes you can make is different obviously.
It doesn’t have to be a heft fee if planned for. Docks are a known quantity where I live so planning is normal. 40 years ago did the HOA know they need to save for maintenance and repairs? What about 20 years? There is another building nearby that is exactly the same as the building that collapsed, but their HOA kept up with proper maintenance. That other building seems like it’s in great shape for a 40 year old building.
It will be interesting to see what happened here. Was the HOA so negligent over such a long period of time that it was just too hard to catch up (100k assessment is hard for most people)?
Jokes aside, this is a horrible tragedy. It would be interesting to know if they had earlier warnings as well and if that didn't contribute to ignoring the problem as there were no major consequences.
It would be interesting to know when in 2018 that the report was finalized as that would be around the same time as the FIU bridge collapse.
Seeing things like this makes me very wary to have joint ownership as the majority can hold the minority hostage on things like repair.
And what could you do in this situation? Sell your unit? If it collapses in 6 months to a year and kills the person you sold it to, what is the morality of that decision?
When shopping, the potential unknown around future assessments scared me off. Now I would be even more terrified.
No, this is precisely the logic that lead to the O-ring failure on the space shuttle.
It even has a name now: The Normalisaton of Deviance
For example, I have a report advising me, as a matter of the utmost urgency, that the fact the windows can be opened may pose a risk of falling.
If your country's inspection regimes don't produce such boilerplate warnings when no action is needed, consider yourself lucky!
The letter the county sends out http://www.miamidade.gov/permits/library/recertification-bui... says: "Failure to submit the required Recertification Report will result in the issuance of a Civil Violation Notice or ticket without further notice to you and referral of this matter to the Unsafe Structures Unit for the initiation of condemnation proceedings"
So to me this makes it seem like some government checks are in place. But curious if there were more recent government backed inspections for safety.
Probability of every single accident is just too low, fix too expensive, and people in charge just decide to ignore it or postpone action.
Bug, guess what, there are too many cases of those single low probabilities, so something somewhere has to happen, it's just what and where.
That's not always true. There are industries where the the consequences for ignoring warnings are too great and any warning sign in a specific class is a must-handle-as-emergency event (either by law or by liability concerns), such as a commercial pilot showing up for work with even the tiniest signs of intoxication, or a student casually mentioning to a teacher or therapist (mandated reporters) things that could indicate abuse.
Bartenders, however, mostly won't go to jail for serving a drink that made someone drunk enough to kill someone with their car minutes later, however. There are certainly gaps.
I think the whole Boeing scandal of the last years proves the opposite, no industry is safe.
I can't find it right now but I remember seeing a documentary about Boeing factory workers reporting issues in the assembly lines and being fired and sued over it.
Edit: might have been: https://youtu.be/PdYcJldzOdw
> It said drinking was endemic among employees and those who complained were bullied and ostracized for blowing the whistle.
Presently, even a casual mention of a pilot drinking near flight time to airline management will ground them for testing. I imagine it was like that, then, too.
In converse the universe follows laws of cause and effect. Every disaster is presaged by warning signs and could be predicted in foresight.
So this pattern is everywhere something goes wrong, but is also quite rare.
Quite "Many concrete structures built this century will be obsolete before its end"
I understand that failures in one part of a structure may cause a catastrophic failure in a separate, seemingly far away, part of the structure. But it feels like if the engineer(s?) reported that things needed to be fixed quite soon and then that part of the building is what failed that the media would have pointed this out by now.
>Appearing to reinforce the experts’ theory is the story of a resident who called her husband moments before the collapse to tell him she could see a crater in the pool area from the fourth-floor balcony of their ocean-front apartment. Then the line went dead, said Mike Stratton, who was out of town at the time. His wife, Cassie, is among the 156 people who are still unaccounted for.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...
What happens if you're a recent purchaser...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/05/salford-resi...
It'll be something like a burst water-main creating a sink hole.
These, we should have known stories are pretty lame.
I wondered this. Some of the eye witness accounts of those who escaped said the parking garage was full of water they had to go through to get out. Sink holes also happen a lot in FL, but not sure how often that close to the beach.
The pool never collapsed or lost water. Local pipes bursting from the collapse might do that.
Things like a truck hitting a pylon would also need bad architecture. A water or sewerage leak could undercut a few pylons at once.
https://www.ethicaladvocate.com/construction-industry-ethics...
Interesting question where I assume yes. No matter how well something is built, without proper maintenance it will eventually fail.
People can downvote my comment all they want, there will be a in-depth inquiry here and I will be surprised if it doesn't somehow transpire there was some pre-existing risk that precipitated events...