Condo collapse in Miami Beach

[2muchcoffeeman]

Happened in the overnight.

 

[Spartan Squad]

Good lord.

 

[maumann]

Have been watching reports all morning and bracing for much worse news. That's the entire northeast corner of the building that's missing, not just the balconies as I first thought.

Not sure how many of those condos are owned by snowbirds and how many are full-timers, but with no warning, it's not going to be good. The master bedrooms look to have sheared completely off the supporting walls between the front and back units. Once the bottom support gave way, it just pulled the entire building down on itself, floor by floor.

It appears the 40-year-old building was supported by pillars over the ground floor parking lot. To have one or more fail catastrophically is frightening, given the thousands of similar buildings up either coast of Florida.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

How did that collapse in the middle of the night with only one dead?

Gotta think there are many dead buried in that rubble.

 

[Spartan Squad]

How did that collapse in the middle of the night with only one dead?

Gotta think there are many dead buried in that rubble.

They've only found one confirmed dead. There has to be more to come.

One of the Twitter threads said first responders had to amputate a woman's leg(?) to get her out. I thought that **** was only on a House episode. This is all around tragic.

 

[Corky Ramirez up on 94th St.]

How did that collapse in the middle of the night with only one dead?

Gotta think there are many dead buried in that rubble.

I read on WaPo there are 51 people missing.

Is it just me, or do we not hear of these things happening all that much? I recall the pedestrian bridge that collapsed (also in Florida?), but condos/offices? Maybe that's because of more stringent engineering inspections, but I feel like these happened more often in the 70s and 80s, especially after watching those old engineering disaster shows on the History Channel. My earliest memory was of the L'Ambiance Plaza collapse in Bridgeport in 1987, but at least that was when it was still under construction.

 

[Spartan Squad]

Video of the collapse.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

It's like a controlled implosion.

Meanwhile, a pedestrian bridge in D.C. also collapsed yesterday:

DC pedestrian bridge collapses onto highway, injuring several people - CNN

 

[Slacker]

[ The obligatory INFRASTRUCTURE WEEK! post goes here. ]

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

We’re a third world country in denial

 

[MileHigh]

Former Herald colleagues live eight blocks away. Been in Surfside many times. Just horrific.

 

[User 150927]

Just horrific

 

[maumann]

Twelve floors basically pancaked on the ground. Incredible.

 

[SixToe]

Read where they're looking for at least 51 residents, whether in the building rubble or to find out if they were elsewhere. Horrific tragedy.

 

[goalmouth]

This was precisely the climax of this novel

 

[tapintoamerica]

Just horrific

Visually, it’s like 9-11 only faster.
But as others have said, it’s really like the planned and engineered implosion of an aged stadium.

 

[Driftwood]

I'm not a structural engineer, so I ask in all seriousness how something like that happens.
The Romans built stuff 2000 years ago that is still standing. In our race to slap stuff together to turn a profit as quickly as possible, quality is indeed antiquarian.
I was at The Winston when the pedestrian bridge collapsed. I didn't actually see it fall but snapped my head around when people started screaming. The dust was still in the air.

 

[qtlaw]

I'm not a structural engineer, so I ask in all seriousness how something like that happens.
The Romans built stuff 2000 years ago that is still standing. In our race to slap stuff together to turn a profit as quickly as possible, quality is indeed antiquarian.
I was at The Winston when the pedestrian bridge collapsed. I didn't actually see it fall but snapped my head around when people started screaming. The dust was still in the air.

I have not been involved in a collapse but have been involved in numerous concrete structures. This is why there are (at least in California) numerous "special" inspections of concrete mixes, concrete formwork, rebar, concrete pours, and the concrete cores, to ensure that the concrete structure strength is as engineered. The structures are also supposed to be over-engineered to give a safety margin so as even if cracks or some failures appear, we don't have a catastrophe.

I was recently involved in the investigation of one 40 floor project where some rebar deficiency appeared halfway up; needless to say there was a great deal of engineering and inspection time (and lawyering) to get some piece of mind before continuing.

 

[maumann]

I've seen a few early theories (sinkhole, ground shift) but the most plausible is above ground salt water intrusion. The pilings are normally steel covered with a waterproofing like gunite or shotcrete. Over time, that seal cracks or chips away, allowing the steel inside to be exposed to salt water spray. If one of those center supports buckled at the parking deck level -- and that's what it looked like in the video -- down she goes, just like a controlled implosion.

Compounding the issue (and why I would never buy anything taller than a one-story building in Florida) is the combination of shoddy construction, lack of regular maintenance and worst of all, not knowing how long the structure took to build. There were a LOT of projects in the 1970s and 1990s that sat unfinished for years after the original builder went bankrupt -- but eventually someone came along, slapped interior walls and a roof on them and sold them as "new." I have no idea if that's a contributing factor in this instance, but it's ... Florida.

 

[Batman]

I'm not a structural engineer, so I ask in all seriousness how something like that happens.
The Romans built stuff 2000 years ago that is still standing. In our race to slap stuff together to turn a profit as quickly as possible, quality is indeed antiquarian.
I was at The Winston when the pedestrian bridge collapsed. I didn't actually see it fall but snapped my head around when people started screaming. The dust was still in the air.

Assuming it hadn't been renovated, if the building was 40 years old then this seems more likely to be a case of neglect than slapdash construction. Maybe long-term roof leakage or soil shifts that weakened the foundation, something like that.