The collapse may be as much a local government failure as anything else. The building was constructed in 1981. By the early nineties scientists found the building was sinking at what they called an 'alarming' rate.
What was the problem? Local government rules stated that foundations were inspected every forty years. So the first inspection of this building was 2021 and had just begun when it collapsed.
Why not inspect building foundations every twenty years (or sooner) if significant sinking was found?
"Another issue at hand for the Surfside community is one shared with all of Miami Beach: The towns are built on a barrier island. Climate scientists and geologists have long warned that these islands cannot be developed responsibly. They are made of a loose mixture of sand and mud and provide a natural protection for the shoreline.
'These are very dynamic features. We didn’t understand that these islands actually migrate until the 1970s,' said Orrin Pilkey, a professor emeritus of geology at Duke University who has long studied sea-level rise and the over-development of the coast. 'As sea level rises, they move back.'"
In the early 1960's portions of the pavement over a former route of beachfront highway A1A could stll be found underwater over a quarter mile off the coast in places.
"The building was constructed in 1981 ... building was sinking"
Sinking isn't always a problem - look at Venice! I studied Civ Eng at Plymouth Poly (now a university, Devon not MA) back in 1989ish. Back then concrete cancer was all the rage ... and gabions (but I digress.)
The failure of the building in Miami was catastrophic and not gradual. I don't think that monitoring would have worked but it is possible that stresses/strains built up over time - we'll have to wait and see. If it was gradual then there is a good argument in favour of fitting buildings like that with strain gauges as many bridges are. I do a lot of IoT stuff and I estimate that something like £20,000 would get you strain gauges and a monitoring system for a structure like that. It might be £10,000 or £100,000 but a building that size in Miami is worth quite a lot. I'll bet rent on a flat was something like $2,000pm or more.
Inspection of foundations is a tricky one. I am not a Civil Engineer but I trained for it but I don't have X ray eyes and nor do Miami's engineers. That's absolutely the wrong way to go about this sort of thing. I'm not even sure what an "inspection" even means.
There was a fundamental error made at the initial design stage in my opinion. I don't know what but probably relating to the parameters of the ground that was built on. By that I mean that the architects/struct engrs. were promised certain properties of the geotechnics/geophysics - that basically means they were told how the ground would work in holding their structure up.
When you design a structure, it needs to support itself and crucially, the thing it sits on needs to be able to support that structure. You also have to work to a timespan, so you use standard tables for wind strength, earthquake etc. You work to a 1 in n years events.
This building collapsed catastrophically in seconds without warning. I think this will become a real lesson for Civ Eng and not a simple "I told you so" thing and certainly not "shit concrete".
I watched them build a 22-story high rise on landfill (mud/sand) in the SOMA district of San Francisco—it was right next to my building. After demolition of the old structure (a 3-story apartment) and excavation, they did the following:
- Pump water out of the excavated ground. It was a slow drain, maybe 50 gallons per minute, but it ran for months.
- Drive dozens of 90 foot steel pylons into the site with an enormous pile driver.
- Pour the foundation over the pylons.
The Millenium Tower is more than double the height of that, at 46 stories, and it’s right by the water. But they used the same length of pylon. Mind-boggling.
Technically, probably yes, but the math could get ridiculous. Essentially you want to go into solid ground, and if you're in the ocean, solid ground might be miles below sea level. And reclaimed land doesn't change that. Also, if the material higher up shifts, your supports need to be able to survive the ground shifting around it, which means you need not just depth, but girth.
There are many points south of SF against the Bay where the solid ground is down far enough that they instead drive piles until they find enough resistance.
Oracle's HQ is still standing. But the (East) Palo Alto 4 Seasons Hotel, whoops.
I vaguely remember that they went back and drove more piles, somehow, until the building was stable that the exterior glass facade no longer shattered on a regular basis. However they did the work, it wasn't visible from the outside.
It would be very unusual for a city's headlands to be literally miles above solid ground, especially for the carribean, which is extremely shallow (hence the hurricanes).
Take a look at the Florida keys, where you can find bedrock after a couple of meters. You can even go out a mile into the sea and hit bedrock after 6-8 meters:
> especially for the carribean, which is extremely shallow (hence the hurricanes)
The Caribbean is nowhere near shallow, take a look at a marine chart or just the seafloor topography on google maps. The Caribbean is thousands (often over 10K) of feet deep in most areas.
Also, this has nothing to do with hurricanes, which originate off the west coast of Africa.
> Sinking isn't always a problem - look at Venice!
This seems like simultaneously survivorship bias (there have been plenty of buildings in Venice that have collapsed or have been irreparably damaged) and a good example of the dangers of sinking (how many billions on repairs and massive engineering projects to save the city?)
Both statements are correct, but differential settlement is not an "instantaneous" problem, when a building, particularly a reinforced concrete one, is subject to differential settlement it deforms itself following the movements of the foundations or of the soil under the foundations, and this normally allows for several centimeters of deformation (in practice a building as seen from a side is made out of squares, when the foundations on one side lower, squares become a rhomb/diamond). All the rigid elements in the plane of the square (please read as walls, be them brick or other material) are forced "out of their natural shape" and start developing cracks.
Nornally settlement is a process that is very, very slow, years, months or weeks, during which the cracks begin developing, long before the structure collapses.
This must have been a form of failure of the soil that happened in a very short time, more similar to a landslide than to the kind of settlement common in soils (usually sands) near a waterfront.
Most likely the brittle failure was due to corrosion of the steel reinforcing. The corrosion due to chloride ion intrusion. Chloride ion intrusion because it's on the ocean.
Or socially, because fixing the problem was an economic non-starter for the condo association. Or a political non-starter depending on how you squint.
I'm learning that condo associations are essentially monetizing the structure as it was built how ever many years ago, and have just about no interest in long-term maintenance or value.
I'm no engineer either, but it seems logical to me that a building would not even notice mild to moderate uniform sinking, but that differential sinking could split the building in half.
Also, I guess that differential sinking can be detected before catastrophic failure if the sink rate were measured on two or more points on the building. If the south side is sinking at 2mm/year while the north side is sinking at 0.2mm/year, that sounds like a recipe for disaster that you don't need xray eyes to see.
> By the early nineties scientists found the building was sinking at what they called an 'alarming' rate.
I think “alarming” was the term used by USA Today which first reported the study. The scientist himself did not seem alarmed at all:
> Wdownski said he doesn’t believe anybody in the city or state government would have had a reason to be aware of the findings of the study. The bulk of it focused on potential flooding hazards, not engineering concerns. The study’s mention of the “12-story condominium” was relegated to a single line. “We didn’t give it too much importance,” Wdowinski said.
First of all it's largely not actual sand (silicon dioxide) like you get naturally in most of the places like up in Daytona, where they ran the stock-car endurance race on the beach for years before a paved track was built.
Nope, common road vehicles have never been ideal way down on South Florida beaches, even back when there were no rules. The ATV's like the lifeguards have are the kind of thing that really works, or a dune buggy with the fat tires even in places where there were no dunes. Anything heavy just sinks more than you would want.
Because the beach there is so soft you can feel the difference as you walk, and it consists more so of particles of eroded seashells (calcium carbonate) having much larger size, much more random and irregular shapes, and a much wider particle size distribution than the far more universal and familiar true sand elsewhere.
And it all leads more steeply into the Atlantic Ocean, it's not the really wide sandy beach that sometimes is considered more desirable.
Notwithstanding any replenishment which can can upset the balance for a period compared to naturally deposited or eroded material.
The sandcastles that can be built have differences in limitations that can be felt by hand.
And IIRC the building contrators were not all of the highest integrity.
I would say my experiences exploring many of the hi-rises in nearby Broward as a teenager after-hours at the construction sites as they were being built in the late '60s & early '70s was not unique.
All kinds of kids did this in South Florida . . .
There just weren't that many kids when the bulk of the population is retired from up north.
I'm sure I could come up with a word or 2,000 on the subject or even more now after the deadly collapse.
So what? That’s not a reason to write a full and accurate report. Sounds like the guy who wrote the paper is a symptom of the state of their entire state bureaucracy
It’s the building owners job to insure it’s safe, the local government is simply there as backup. As to sinking, that is not inherently a problem as basically all buildings sink or rise over time, differential sinking on the other hand is a major problem.
I thought this was a condo situation? In that case the building was owned by the people who owned the units in the building. Little wonder that the HOA wasn't investing enough in maintenance...
Both HOA’s and landlords are often a major problem when buildings have issues. It’s why local government is involved at all rather unlike single family homes which don’t get inspected.
However, that doesn’t suddenly make it the governments sole responsibility.
Oh yeah I totally agree. I would never buy a condo in a building like this in a location like this, largely because of the impossible situation with respect to "big" maintenance. Americans don't know how to cooperate without the imposition of authority.
I hope Tyler Ley does a video about it. He's a professor at Oklahoma State University who's all about concrete. He did a video about the I35 bridge collapse a few years ago that was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57pi53hBByA
His video production quality is a little rough, but nonetheless his videos are quite interesting. I never knew concrete was so fascinating before coming across his channel.
There's usually a man in the middle, like the CTV building in Christchurch NZ; the engineer was a severe bully, and no one challenged him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTV_Building, for quick reading go-to Royal Commission.
Why does the HN headline say “landfill” while the original article says “artificial land”?
To me “landfill” implies trash/refuse disposal and “artificial land” implies infill of formerly wet/low areas. Not nearly all of the latter is the former.
Some of the oldest settlements in the world are literally trash heaps. There are tells all over the Middle East that are tens of meters tall, representing generations of trash piling up and built over.
To my knowledge those accumulations of material are composed of eroded debris of adobe, mud or stone bricks from preexisting buildings or towns after centuries of erosion.
There current title is pretty confusing without a hyphen. Artificial-land problem? Or is it an Artificial land-problem caused by poor zoning (or is it both?)
I suspect the HN headline, the URL slug, an (from those two, I assume) the original source headline befoe a correction all result from someone using “landfill” where just “fill” or “fill land” (which is the relevant kind of “artificial land”) would have been accurate.
I've built these... The basic idea is you've got some canonical url that you'd love to have links to, but people (and tools) love to mess everything up, so whatever comes in, as long as it's got the number, gets 302'd to the right place and call it a day.
I personally put the number as close to the domain as I can get away with, because the farther away it is, the more likely it is to be truncated, and I don't care how nice the partial URL looks, if it's missing the number, I can't get your content. And no, I'm not building it for just slugs no numbers, because I've seen what happens to those.
> And no, I'm not building it for just slugs no numbers, because I've seen what happens to those.
There was some poor site owner seeking assistance on the Let's Encrypt community site because (of course) even though they swear they haven't changed anything now mysteriously Let's Encrypt stopped working and so it must be a bug in Let's Encrypt.
They're using http-01, so the magic files need to be exposed from a /.well-known/ directory and others have got them to try a test file named "test". When you ask for the test file though, what you get is a 30x redirect to some unrelated blog post.
Well, it looks unrelated at first, and then what I realise is, that post is about Testimonials. Sure enough when I ask for a file named 'chris' instead I get redirected to a blog post about Christmas...
I don't think that user ever figured out what their problem actually was, it's a little frustrating but you have to let them go do their thing.
I've gone back and forth on leaving this comment, but my fundamental concern is that it is far too early to be drawing conclusions about the likely cause of this incident especially for anyone pushing a specific agenda, regardless of how much one might agree (or disagree) with that agenda.
Clearly, there are a set of previously underappreciated risks here. Geology is very much a possible candidate, though other factors might also be at stake. Armchair analysis at a distance and with a specific cause to advance is probably the worst addition to the discussion at this point.
(That's not to say that causes aren't often fairly immediately evident, as with, say, the 737 MAX incidents. But without clear basis for belief, even hunches eventually proved correct are unfounded conclusions.)
My first thought, too. He's blaming it on "climate change." I'm certainly no climate change denier, but the real immediate cause of this collapse could just be substandard engineering and maintenance.
"Big chunks of American cities are built on man-made land that is a climate catastrophe waiting to happen"
I live in Somerset, UK. Just north of where I live is the "Somerset Levels". About 400 years ago a bunch of cloggies (Dutchmen) were engaged to drain the marginal lands for farm land etc. King's Sedgemoor Drain was built later etc. This is the land of Glastonbury (the festival actually happens at a farm in Pilton).
The Neths have centuries of experience of dealing with marginal lands. Your swamps are not going to faze them any more than ours.
Definitely, "Neths" spread their engineering across many continents. However, their engineering practices are now considered a prime reason behind the environment catastrophe that many cities like New Orleans are facing.
They are not. The prima reason that many cities like N. O. are failing is poor engineering practices. Dutch companies even offered free consulting after Katrina, which was refused by the Americans. Now, many poorer places cannot afford the measures that are taken in the Netherlands (if you ever live in Amsterdam and are annoyed with your watership bill, be happy that it is used to fund your continued dry feet!). Americans however seem to not want to pay for it, and seem to not want to understand what sustainable watermanagement and new land develooment is like.
Hurricanes are bad, but they don't need to be Katrina-bad.
Please feel free to cite some sources or give details.
Engineering solutions rarely cause climate change. I'll grant you that enough concrete pouring might be nasty but I doubt a very small country in Europe, next door to Germany is responsible for all of it.
I wonder how this collapse is going to affect insurance rates for other buildings build on terribly unstable land. Engineers are well aware of this risk, but now that it’s happening and it’s real, they will calculate it differently, I think.
Insurance is an industry that's usually driven by real data. So the likelihood of claims just went up for all similar buildings. This translates pretty directly into increases in premiums, or even cancellation of policies.
This is true for areas that are earthquake or fire-prone. But especially areas that are vulnerable to sea-level rise due to climate change.
If nobody else is going to act, on climate-change (act = change how they do business), it will certainly be the Insurance companies who will act. They have a great deal to lose. And they do not profit by buying in to the big lie.
Wouldn't an alternative approach be price caps on insurance policies and/or government subsidies for insurance in these areas? Those options might not be economically viable, but they would be politically popular.
I don't see liability caps as the sensible approach here.
Liability caps are used in specific instances where losses might otherwise prove catastrophic to the insurer. The two areas which come immediately to mind (and no, I'm not versed in the industry though I did in fact study it, lightly, in school), are major disaster property insurance (flood, hurricane, earthquake), and liability caps (general liability, medical malpractice). Both are specific to how insurance works, at least in theory.
The most usual basis of insurance is risk pooling, largely for uncorrelated and individual risks. Premiums covering house fires, automobile property and liability damage, workplace injury, or shipping, tend to cover (from the perspective of the insurer) relative small claims which tend to occur predictably and independently.
Where caps are imposed, either predictability or correlation tend to be less manageable. The insurance sector has long lobbied against tort policies favouring claimants, and argued that tort liability claims have been skyrocketing. I studied the tort liability crisis of the 1980s in particular, and have kept an eye on this issue in the decades since. In truth, the 1980s crisis owed far more to the inflation surge, and remission, of the late 1970s and early 1980s. With inflation came higher (nominal) returns on investment returns, which is where insurance companies invest premium payments pending payouts. While the industry was screaming "out of control court judgements", the reality seemed far more to be one of getting whipsawed by the (pre-inflation) pricing of policies, the (high investment returns) period of low premium rates (subsidised in effect by investment returns), and under the Volker inflation controls and tight-money policies, falling investment returns whilst claims increased, largely in step with inflation. Caps on payments would in this case address the inflation/investment risk side of the business.
Correlated claims is the other situation.
Individual risks --- automobile crashes, house fires, accidents, structural collapses --- tend to be independent of one another. In major widespread events, a large number of correlated claims occur, and can stress the capabilities of even large insurers or the industry as a whole. Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, major wildfires, tsunamis, ice storms, and drought can affect large areas, ranging from major portions of a single city to regional or continental regions. Though the events are distributed across time, when they occur, they occur everywhere at once, at least within the affected region. Payouts in this case require limitation.
Virtually all insurance policies include exclusions for acts of war or civil disturbance. As with natural disaster, these occur in unpredictable and widespread manners, and are poorly handled by commercial insurance.
Depending on the underlying mechanism for the Surfside building collapse, there might or might not be correlated risks.
If the principle cause is in fact climate-induced geological undermining which could affect large low-lying coastal regions, then yes, it's possible that those zones could simply become uninsurable.
If the principle cause is poor building methods or design, then the risks would be limited to, say, construction by the contractors or designs by the architects in question.
If the principle cause is poor maintenance and inspection processes, then the risks would apply to the specific geopolitical domains affected by those inspections. Surfside, Miami-Dade County, or the State of Florida as a whole might be affected. Here it's likely that the insurance industry, through property owners and residents / tenants of such buildings would be able to impose reforms to the inspection and remediation processes, which gets at another mechanism of insurance itself: of actively managing and mitigating risks, not merely pooling them.
Florida has been here already when insurance companies stopped providing policies given the threat of hurricanes. It forced the state to create its own company, Citizens [1], an insurer of last resort.
With private insurers, all it takes is one small claim to cancel a policy. Many property owners have no choice but sign up with Citizens when private entities refuse to issue a contract or set the price so high it is simply unaffordable.
But Citizens will also try to offload contracts to small private insurers (that most have never heard of). Then the concern becomes, “will my insurer survive the financial onslaught of claims or go bankrupt before I get my check?”
Fun fact: Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park has issues like this as well. I looked at a house that had been freshly-painted before being put on the market, and it was flawless in the pictures. But by the time I saw the home in-person several months later, there were huge cracks in the paint in many of the rooms.
When I asked the realtor about it, she just said, "there's a reason it's called Sand Hill Road".
Depends on the degree of movement. My friend in Pasadena bought a house on an old stream bed. Now the house needs to be jacked up.
Look at the land around Portuguese Bend in Los Angeles County. The water line is above ground because the pipes break if they're buried(that's a lot of movement though).
It would be quite hard to fake enough cube samples for that and unlikely to be worth the bother. The steelwork failing is more likely. Pre-stressed conc is basically an explosion waiting to happen, which makes demolitions interesting. Another possibility is concrete cancer but the map cracking is well known and easily recognised. That last is unlikely and easy to rule out with some simple chemistry. However, Miami is on the coast so the extra ingredients are there.
There are loads of possibilities but at the moment I think foundation failure is most likely. Unless you pile down to bedrock or build a gigantic raft of conc. then you need very stable land for a building that size. Another other option is to build it flexible but that was obviously not the case. The geology there is likely to be a nightmare. Miami is a lot of reclaimed land, low lying and next door to the Atlantic.
The sight of the collapse is something I won't forget in a hurry. The secondary collapse on the right in the security camera footage took about three seconds. That's insanely fast. The failure was absolutely catastrophic. It wasn't simply a cascade - the whole structure seemed to fail simultaneously from top to bottom and that is not normal.
Shoddy concrete work seems to be a running gag in the south. I had a related experience when the NOLA Hard Rock Cafe collapsed onto the street seconds after I walked down said street. It wouldn't surprise me if the concrete work in the collapsed condo was of a similar (lacking) level of quality.
If you mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal that is rather different - a non catastrophic, partial collapse of an unfinished structure. This was a catastrophic collapse of a well used structure. People died in both so please don't think I am trivialising the NOLA tragedy but it was different.
When you use concrete in large amounts you take standard samples called cubes as you pour and these are subjected to standard tests. In the UK we use a 10x10x10 cm cube and then it's allowed to cure for a standard time in standard conditions and then crushed. There's a bit more to it than that but basically, it is quite easy to demonstrate "standard" concrete and there is not much money to be made with rubbish materials. There are exciting possibilities involving admixtures but that is down to workmanship. Shoddy concrete (whatever that is) is very unlikely but a popular meme.
Conc. for a structure like that may be pre-stressed or at least reinforced. Pre stressed is where you put rods or creatively shaped steel through it and literally squeeze it. Conc is great in compression (pushed/squeezed) but rubbish in tension (pulled apart). Imagine a beam supported at both ends and think of pushing down on it in the middle. It will try to bend in a curve. The top surface will try to get smaller and hence is in compression and the bottom will try to stretch and is in tension. If you drill a hole along the length of your beam near the bottom and stick a steel rod through it and put some washers and nuts on and crank on some compression you now have a sort of model for pre stressed concrete. The steel rod is ace in tension and gives the concrete beam a lot more strength. Embedding steel mesh ("rebar" or reinforcement bars and the like) have a similar effect but ...
The thing about pre stressing over adding mesh/rebar is that you are locking away a huge amount of energy into a static structure. There is a huge gain to be had in reduced thickness of conc and hence weight which means its a double win but you also need to ensure that the "rods" (in our model, not quite reality) never fail. If they do fail then it's normally rapid not just a gradual fail. The effect of prestressing can happen by accident in "normal" meshed conc. Most digger drivers that have used a pile driver attachment to break large chunks of conc. will have tales to tell of large lumps of conc suddenly exploding. Fishermen often tell tales of the one that got away ... 8) However it can happen.
So I hope I've shown that shoddy concrete itself is unlikely. There are far more ways for a structure to fail than that. Workmanship is possible but for my money the ground basically dropped away from under the structure and it sort of exploded and imploded simultaneously. I can't put this any other way but it seemed to fail completely in every way possible, simultaneously.
It is the most horrible thing to watch and will haunt us forever.
this is true, if you take standard samples and test them. but the Hard Rock New Orleans may have bogus inspections and testing.
>Tweeter reported three other on-site inspections in July, August and October, but the GPS records show her vehicle stopping at the Hard Rock on just one of those dates.
the Hard Rock New Orleans could have been insufficient supports changed after the city approved plans [2].
>The last set of plans approved by the city were dated June 2018. Those called for the sturdier 16-gauge metal decking. Those plans were revised to go with the thinner, lighter 22-gauge decking in February 2019, shortly after the emails between the construction team and New Millennium. The city confirmed it never received those revisions.
Maybe what you say rules it out anyway, but can concrete deteriorate over time? Eg maybe it was up to strength at the time, but somehow weakened over the 40 years? I don’t know anything about concrete...
I don’t think so; the article correctly starts with the collapse but doesn’t jump to a single-issue conclusion, then cites notable other examples including the Kansas Osaka airport and San Francisco
A good chunk of San Francisco -- and the entire SF Bay area -- is landfill used to expand the size of the city. When they built the metro subway going under market street they discovered a shipwreck and bulldozed through it. There's also a bar - The Old Ship Saloon - built inside a shipwreck
Much of Boston is also land fill. The original part of central Boston (basically Beacon Hill and the North End) was all but an island only connected to other land by a thin isthmus.
2mm/year sounds like a very small number to me... compared to eg. thermal expansion during day/night and summer/winter cycles, that is practically zero, and even after 40 years of sinking, surely there'd be massive warning signs (eg. growing cracks) before such a collapse.
> surely there'd be massive warning signs (eg. growing cracks) before such a collapse.
There were. I'm not a civil/structural engineer and I don't know how common this kind of thing is.
> One condo owner sued the unit association for failing to fix the cracks in the outside wall of her unit in 2015, according to a lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade County. The condo owner, who could not be reached for comment, said the cracks led to water damage that cost $15,000. The court documents noted that because the cracks were a structural issue the building association was liable for the expense.
> The condo owner had previously filed a lawsuit against the building association in 2001 due to a similar issue. The two sides settled outside of court, but that kind of cracking is described as “of interest” in the county’s Structural Recertification Form.
I read another article about a resident complaining about cracking near the pool deck.
The problem is that the 2mm is probably not even over the building. If one corner is subsiding significantly more than the other, eventually one corner of the building is being held up by shear forces from the rest of the building. But concrete isn't very good with handling shear stress. So then it breaks, drops, hits the ground and you have a building collapse.
From aerial photographs, the building appears to be about 100m in its longest horizontal dimension. It was 12 stories tall, so maybe 40m? Assuming it was made with a steel frame, then the expansion going from that area's record low temperature to its record high temperature would be about 40mm horizontal and about 16mm vertical. Presumably it was designed to handle that, with a decent safety margin.
That is indeed much more than the 2mm it was sinking each year.
But wait...the temperature swings of the frame, and other interior parts of the building, is going to be a lot less than the outside temperature. That's going to cut that 40mm horizontal and 16mm vertical expansion way down.
Also normal thermal expansion alternates with normal thermal contraction, so wouldn't it average out to close to zero net movement over the course of each year, with a small net expansion due to climate change (Florida average temperature is up under 0.5℃ since that building was built)?
Sinking, on the other hand, is usually cumulative. 2mm/year over 40 years is 80mm. So you've got a building designed to expand and contract, staying within some range, having a net vertical movement imposed on it that is a lot larger, and probably a lot less uniform.
Serious question: 40,000 lbs bomb exploded by Navy few days ago close to FL shore, wouldn't that kind of underwater shockwave speedup the process of building deterioration?
"The United States Geological Survey recorded the explosion as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake about 161 kilometers off the coast of Florida."
Back in the 1970s, the author John MacDonald, best know for his Travis McGee mysteries, wrote the novel Condominium, about a badly-built condominium building on the Florida coast. It was made into a TV movie in the early 1980s. I didn't read the book, and only saw a trailer for the movie, but my recollection was that a hurricane was the instrument of the disaster.
These types of articles strike me as downright ghoulish - shoving in their pet cause well before the facts have been established. It would be one thing to say make an article listing potential hypotheses but I find the blend of speculation and advocacy is deeply offputting.
Clear the rubble, run a seismic radar, detect any airpockets, install constant underground radar across the entire island, create a museum on the site educating locals about geology/sinkholes. You can have the best engineers in the world, more frequent inspections, but if the foundation is ignored it will not matter.
This is a grit-your-teeth issue every time a storm comes near, especially with the building boom in South Florida (Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade Counties).
Before Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992, the region had not been impacted by a significant storm in years and there was a very lax attitude toward building codes. Many places built in the 1980s we’re not always constructed with the most sound practices [1], builders were taking shortcuts and local government turned a blind eye to the issue.
Andrew changed everyone’s thinking after the “new” neighborhood of CountryWalk was flattened [2]. Some of the strictest building codes in the nation were implemented — and enforced — after Andrew.
But the lax attitude has returned. For instance, in the past decade, I’ve seen new multi-level residential buildings constructed with wood (instead of concrete) above the second floor, wondering how such construction even receives approval given the building code.
But it is happening, and the majority non-native, transient population has no clue the overpriced real estate they’ve purchased may not be suited to handle a major storm. They will face a reckoning if this day ever comes.
I would advise anyone looking to buy down here to do your due diligence. Hire a good inspector and engineer to examine your potential purchase, as well as a lawyer to make sure all repairs or improvements were all done above board.
I believe a Professional Engineer with correct certification has to sign off on if you go above two stories, before the authorities will allow it to be built.
Frankly this is a pastime of mine. Whenever anything even vaguely mysterious comes up in the news I make up conspiracy theories to tell my wife and laugh about, always leaving it slightly vague how serious I might be, just to keep her on her toes. :)
Hey, this horrible thing that happened might be related to something I’m on a soapbox about, so I’m going to rush to judgement and point fingers. As long as it helps my narrative, I don’t need to wait for ‘facts’.
I haven't heard of any major collapses in Foster City. Plenty of fill there. The only collapse in recent memory was a section of SF that liquified in an earthquake.
Maybe all buildings over 3 stories need more frequent and detailed periodic structural fatigue/engineering assessments, eh?
I seem to remember Foster City being mostly short single-family homes, two stories, maybe three at the most. There might have been one or two apartment complexes, but not tall condos like this one.
Who exactly is profiting? It's a condo building, you understand, and most units were owner-occupied. Upkeep was paid by the tenants as part of their condo dues. This is organized by the condo's board, an entity which is operated for the benefit of the condo owners. At best you could say, "These residents lacked foresight," but that doesn't really support your premise that capitalism caused this.
Having an ideological axe to grind like this one is a major risk to your intellectual integrity. It can blind you to reality, or worse, it can make it so you don't actually care what is real anymore.
The people who knew about it and didn't engage with renovations
They knew about it and let it happen so insurance can help them with financial support
The result of the investigation will be: "natural cause"
> Having an ideological axe to grind like this one is a major risk to your intellectual integrity. It can blind you to reality, or worse, it can make it so you don't actually care what is real anymore.
Yup yup, i am so blind that i don't even have to work anymore, i abused this civilization and made insane profits, i no longer have to worry about needing money anymore
Yup yup, i am blind, i don't care waht is real anymore
Again, you're positing this shadowy "they" who somehow saved a lot of money — but the building was owned by the people who lived there, and I'm pretty sure if the condo owners actually knew about the renovations that needed doing, they'd have spent the money to make the repairs, rather than getting crushed to death in their sleep.
What was the problem? Local government rules stated that foundations were inspected every forty years. So the first inspection of this building was 2021 and had just begun when it collapsed.
Why not inspect building foundations every twenty years (or sooner) if significant sinking was found?