Miami Herald Report on the Surfside Condo Collapse: House of Cards | Hacker News Reader

Miami Herald Report on the Surfside Condo Collapse: House of Cards

miamiherald.com

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Having gone through this infographic, one thing starkly stood out.

1. There was a 7 minute gap between the initial structural failure and the rest of the tower to collapse .

2. Due to the failure of the alarm system or something else, the alarm did not sound .

7 minutes is an eternally long time for people to get out had the alarms sounded correctly.

May be the alarms were not designed to go off in the case of structural failure and only for fire etc ?

> 2. Due to the failure of the alarm system or something else, the alarm did not sound .

> 7 minutes is an eternally long time for people to get out had the alarms sounded correctly.

> May be the alarms were not designed to go off in the case of structural failure and only for fire etc ?

There was a linked paywalled article, the link text seems to indicate that alarm logs show the alarm was triggered. Not sure by what, maybe the article has details. I wouldn't expect some sort of collapse sensor in the fire alarm system, but when the pool deck collapsed, it may have released enough dust to trigger a smoke detector in the parking garage, or it may have disconnected sensors which could also be a triggering condition.

Every commerical building I've ever seen has fire alarm levers on the walls. Somebody could have triggered the alarm manually.

These fire alarm levers are everywhere, but they rarely ever get used in an emergency. If what happened is someone pulled the lever and the system logged it but the alarm didn't go off, that's a huge problem.

> Every commerical building I've ever seen has fire alarm levers on the walls.

I see these very rarely nowadays.

Apparently they get triggered too often as pranks, and it trains people to ignore the alarms. So, they don't put them in new construction.

I don't think most building alarms account for a collapse that isn't the result of some other event like fire or earthquake, partially because keeping the alarm system running through the collapse is hard and partially through the mistaken assumption that the initial collapse would be loud/energetic enough to alert everyone in the vincinity.

This is an excellent presentation of the engineering analysis of the Surfside Condo / Champlain Tower collapse in Miami June 24, 2021.

The residents of Champlain tower have filed a lawsuit against the condo association and the developers of a recently built building next door. In the lawsuit they allege and present evidence that damage caused by construction on the adjacent property contributed significantly to the collapse. Whether the claims are valid I am not qualified to judge, but the lack of any analysis of the possible role it played seems to render this a less than excellent engineering analysis.

>> In the lawsuit they allege and present evidence that damage caused by construction on the adjacent property contributed significantly to the collapse.

Which is pretty much the same thing the developers/owners of the millennium tower in San Francisco are claiming - but to me that holds no weight. When you build a building, you can't just assume that nobody is going to do nothing nearby you for the next 100+ years - the building design should account for that; seems to me they are passing the buck, or at least trying too.

This analysis is centered on the mechanism and timeline of collapse, with nothing to say about the direct cause.

It appears from this analysis, IMHO, poor design and build, an apparent lack of code enforcement, and poor maintenance and repair led to the building collapsing within minutes of the pool deck failure. There's still room to consider the factors leading to the pool deck failure; although certainly the previous factors would be part of that too.

> Furman helped the older woman climb over the rubble, their path illuminated by the sparks of live wires, she said. “It looks like I’m in hell,” Furman said.

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