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Comment by andscoop | Hacker News Reader

I doubt there would be a super surge of reporting for this collapse either if we weren’t looking at a 100 person death count.

I hadn’t heard of any New York buildings collapsing so I googled and found one building under construction that collapsed. There was at least one causality, but a much less compelling story overall.

I don’t find myself agreeing with your take that this is partisan media at play. This will likely turn out to be deadliest building collapse America has seen.

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Surely that would be the World Trade Center?

You mean, where passenger jets were used as missiles?

It doesn’t seem remotely relevant to what happened in Florida.

Structural collapses have a wide variety of causes. Wind, fire, earthquakes, snow, flood, design errors, poor workmanship, poor maintainance, corrosion, water damage, pest damage, overloading, fatigue, accidental collision, and yes, terrorism. Most of them aren't directly relevant to each other in terms of lessons learned. But if for some reason you want to rank all "building collapses" by lives lost, I don't know why you would exclude the World Trade Center. It was a building (actually a complex of buildings) and it collapsed. I'm not sure what else you would call it.

So if somebody posts an article about a company with a crappy record in maritime safety, I can bring up Pearl Harbor as relevant?

Depends. Do they call it the "greatest maritime disaster in history" or somesuch? If so, then yes Pearl Harbor would absolutely be fair game to bring into the conversation. In that scenario, they're the one being hyperbolic, not you.

The article’s context is about time-related deterioration, lack of transparency, and how on-top and empowered boards and local civil authorities are to handle critical issues that were both known and could have been prevented.

So I still fail to see the relevance of the WTC collapse, other than both being catastrophic.

I wasn't responding directly to the article, I was responding to the person who commented "This will likely turn out to be deadliest building collapse America has seen." They were making the point about just how catastrophic (and therefore worth of press coverage) the collapse was by by comparing it, in terms of lives lost, with other structural collapses.

Obviously the WTC has nothing to do with the problem of concrete deterioration, but neither did any of the other big collapses that Surfside is likely to surpass (Pemberton Mill, Knickerbocker Theater, Hyatt Regency, etc). They all had very different causes and different lessons to teach.

Why would you assume the poster meant everything above and beyond deterioration related collapse?

I understood “deadliest building collapse America has ever seen” to be context-specific, and I suspect others interpreted it this way as well.

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