Florida building collapse

[displacedinMN]

DC it if needed

Horrifying video of this morning's condo collapse in Florida https://t.co/yBPaoeUNid

— Aarik Woods (@aarikwoods) June 24, 2021

[Donger]

FWIW:

Those findings seem to be supported by a report that Michael Stratton was on the phone with his wife, Cassondra, who told him their building was shaking just before the collapse. She was looking out from a condo at Champlain Towers South when she told him she saw "a sinkhole where the pool out her window used to be," he told the Miami Herald.

The phone call then cut off. Stratton is among the scores of people who remain unaccounted for days after the collapse. The death toll stands at 10.

[Dartgod]

Originally Posted by Donger

FWIW:

Those findings seem to be supported by a report that Michael Stratton was on the phone with his wife, Cassondra, who told him their building was shaking just before the collapse. She was looking out from a condo at Champlain Towers South when she told him she saw "a sinkhole where the pool out her window used to be," he told the Miami Herald.

The phone call then cut off. Stratton is among the scores of people who remain unaccounted for days after the collapse. The death toll stands at 10.

The pool in the lower left of this photo? Is that where she saw the sinkhole?

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by gblowfish

Yeah, this is awful. Back when I did news gathering in the early 1980s in Columbia, these frat boys went down to Jacks Fork on a float trip. There was a big storm, they got caught in it on the river, huge flash flood and a couple of them drowned. The news director wanted to send a crew to wait for these guys to get back home to their frat house, camp out in front of it, then ask them how they felt about their frat brothers drowning. I refused to go. They sent a different cameraman, and I got out of the news biz about a week after that. The song "Dirty Laundry" sums it up well. "It's interesting when people die..."

My Dad was a cub reporter for the KC star in the 70s. A family had just lost their son. My Dad asked if they wanted to talk about it and they said no. The dispatcher told him to get back in there and get a quote. My Dad refused and got fired for it.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by Donger

FWIW:

Those findings seem to be supported by a report that Michael Stratton was on the phone with his wife, Cassondra, who told him their building was shaking just before the collapse. She was looking out from a condo at Champlain Towers South when she told him she saw "a sinkhole where the pool out her window used to be," he told the Miami Herald.

The phone call then cut off. Stratton is among the scores of people who remain unaccounted for days after the collapse. The death toll stands at 10.

Maybe she was in that part of the tower that remained standing for a few seconds, then collapsed.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Dartgod

The pool in the lower left of this photo? Is that where she saw the sinkhole?

Well, there goes that anecdote.

[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by Frazod

It's not just reporters. Sure, some of the ones who cover disasters are scumbags, but at least they're on the job.

An EF-3 tornado hit in my area earlier in the week. Tornados are fairly rare this far north (suburban Chicago), especially strong ones that damage heavily populated areas. Luckily there were no fatalities, but there was a good amount of damage. In addition to the reporters, there were a bunch of rubberneckers touring the area. One woman drove in from outside the immediate area, parked her car, hauled out a double stroller and pushed her kids around with one hand while filming the damage on her phone with the other, like it was some sort of tourist attraction. Jesus. Eventually the cops had to set up road blocks to keep them out.

Ruined homes and lives aren't the ****ing Pirates of the Caribbean.

That's really terrible. WTF is wrong with people?

[RunKC]

Originally Posted by Dartgod

The pool in the lower left of this photo? Is that where she saw the sinkhole?

Was there a confirmed sinkhole?

Not sure if it’s been mentioned but Florida is the worst state for sinkholes bc the ground is comprised mostly of limestone which erodes far quicker than other material.

But the worst of it is documented in central Florida

[displacedinMN]

A top Miami-Dade fire official on Saturday told family members of people missing in the rubble of a collapsed condo building that demolition workers planned to bring down the remainder of the building on Sunday.

Worries have intensified over the past week that the damaged structure could come tumbling down on its own, endangering the crews below and complicating the search for victims.

Fire Rescue Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told family members during a morning briefing that the building would be brought down "as soon as possible. First thing tomorrow."

But he cautioned that there "may be some hiccups." A follow-up meeting will be held in the afternoon to finalize details of the demolition, which could be a precarious operation as experts enter the building to bore into the structure to install explosives.

Concerns that the still-standing portion could tumble have curtailed the search in areas close to that section, and shifts detected by monitors early Thursday prompted a 15-hour suspension of the entire search until engineers determined the site was safe to restart.

Jadallah said the remnants of the demolished building would be removed immediately after with the intent of giving rescuers access for the first time to parts of the garage area that is a focus of the search. Such access could give officials a clearer picture of the voids that might exist in the rubble and could possibly harbor survivors.

No one has been rescued since the first hours after the June 24 collapse. The approach of Hurricane Elsa from the Caribbean Sea also raises concerns that strong winds possible in South Florida by late Sunday or early Monday could further destabilize the standing portion of the towers.

The confirmed death toll from the collapse of the condominium building on June 24 stood at 22 early Saturday. Officials reduced the number of missing from 145 to 126 after duplicate names were eliminated and some residents reported missing turned up safe.

The demolition of the building would temporarily suspend search operations, but officials hope not for long. Some families asked to be able to return to the building to retrieve personal belongings, but will not be allowed to do so.

[Frazod]

They really should change words at this point - it's not rescue; it's recovery.

[Deberg_1990]

Wow. But I understand. Extremely doubtful there is anyone left alive in there.

[Titty Meat]

You must have been walking around the building at the time Fatzod

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by eDave

Current reporting shows this to be one huge case of gross negligence that got 160 dead. Ugly.

Condos around here built after the mid-90's and Hurricane Andrew are the safest places to be in a hurricane.

These older ones are vulnerable to shoddy work and corruption. And as in this case, if its a big repair bill that the current owners have to fix, they keep putting it off because of the cost.

I'd see some new regulations coming out of this that the structural concerns/repairs/ must be resolved within "X" amount of time or they must vacate the building.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by Frazod

They really should change words at this point - it's not rescue; it's recovery.

Yep, can't imagine there's anyone still alive. And how shitty would it be for the remaining residents watching the rest of the building come down with all their stuff still in it. But I suppose they should just be thankful to be alive. Horrible deal all around for everyone involved.

[Chief Pagan]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

Condos around here built after the mid-90's and Hurricane Andrew are the safest places to be in a hurricane.

These older ones are vulnerable to shoddy work and corruption. And as in this case, if its a big repair bill that the current owners have to fix, they keep putting it off because of the cost.

I'd see some new regulations coming out of this that the structural concerns/repairs/ must be resolved within "X" amount of time or they must vacate the building.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/u...-collapse.html

Spoiler!

SURFSIDE, Fla. — Elena Blasser kept her two-bedroom, two-bath condo in the Champlain Towers South as a beachside gathering place for family reunions. She adored the ocean and the small town of Surfside, Fla., because they reminded her of homes in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

She sank at least $100,000 into renovations when she bought Penthouse 11 a little more than a decade ago. Then the complex’s problems began. Hairline cracks in the pool deck. Newly painted walls that chipped easily. Water pooling in the garage. To pay for it all, the monthly maintenance fees and special assessments grew.

“We’re paying those fees and where are they going?” Ms. Blasser, a 64-year-old former schoolteacher, kept telling her family and neighbors, according to her son Pablo Rodriguez.

Little did she know that the problems identified in the building were about to get much worse. A consultant’s report commissioned in 2018 had identified serious problems of crumbling concrete and corroded rebar — problems that engineers warned had already led to “major structural damage.”

Fixing it, the condo board eventually concluded, would cost an estimated $15 million. Ms. Blasser would have to come up with another $120,000 to pay her share.

Long before half of the Champlain Towers South crumpled to the ground on June 24, killing at least 24 people and leaving up to 121 unaccounted for — including Ms. Blasser and her mother, Elena Chavez, 88 — the rancor over how the building was run by its condominium association was an open secret known to the relatives and friends of the people who lived there, and even to residents of other nearby buildings.


Pablo Rodriguez said his mother, Elena Blasser, broke into tears when she was asked to pay another special assessment.

It coexisted with the joys of the otherwise congenial community of condo dwellers who had been sold on the Florida dream of waterfront bliss. Emma Guara, 4, would stop John Turis, 76, by the pool to play with Leela, his Cavalier King Charles spaniel, when he was in town from Brooklyn. Ana and Juan Mora would swing by a neighbor’s unit on the 10th floor to see if she needed anything. Younger residents would look out for older ones when they waded into the ocean.

By the time the board members entrusted by their neighbors with overseeing the building hired an engineer to tell them what they had long suspected — that their aging condo was in dire need of top-to-bottom repairs — the meetings at the 13-story complex had developed a toxic reputation.

“People said, ‘Oh my God, thank God you’re not at the board meeting,’” Sharon Schechter recalled. “‘There’s screaming and yelling.’”

Tense stalemates delayed any decisions as the board became a hothouse of grievance over who was to blame, according to interviews with survivors of the collapse, former residents, relatives of the missing, lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

Ms. Blasser’s frustration grew each year, Mr. Rodriguez said. In 2017, she paid $60,000 for a special assessment to help make repairs. Then came the latest one, Mr. Rodriguez said, breaking into tears.

“She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe we have to do this again,’” he said.

In April, fed up, Ms. Blasser reached out to a real estate agent about selling her condo and was told it would sell quickly for close to a million dollars.


The 2018 engineering report from Frank P. Morabito, the consulting engineer, was deeply troubling. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of failing, but he estimated that repairs would cost more than $9 million.



“Sadly a few of our residents have undermined our progress with petty challenges, discrediting the board members and management,” they said.

Mr. Turis, a real estate and mortgage broker in New York who bought Unit 409 in 2005 so his daughter could live in it while she attended college, said the building had been mired in turnover of board members and property managers.

“It was like nobody wanted the job,” he said. “It seemed like nobody ever lasted more than two years.”

On Sept. 13, 2019, Graciela M. Escalante, who chaired the committee in charge of the 40-year recertification project, recommended hiring Mr. Morabito’s firm to carry out the work, even though his bid was the most expensive and initially led to what the selection committee admitted was “sticker shock.”

The next day, Anette Goldstein, the board president, and Nancy K. Levin, the vice president, both resigned, saying they were frustrated by last-minute objections that kept derailing progress on repairs.

“This pattern has repeated itself over and over, ego battles, undermining the roles of fellow board members, circulation of gossip and mistruths,” Ms. Goldstein wrote. “I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the functioning of our board and many before us, but it describes a board that works very hard but cannot for the reasons above accomplish the goals we set to accomplish.”

In all, six of seven board members resigned, five of them in the two weeks leading up to Oct. 3, 2019. At a board meeting that day, Ms. Escalante and others laid out a slew of concerns. She was elected the new president and, as the building official for the neighboring village of Bal Harbour, she had real expertise for the job.



“The building is falling apart,” he wrote to the board the following month, accusing the previous members of prioritizing renovations to common-area bathrooms over structural repairs.

“Somebody can seriously be injured or killed with the state of the concrete,” he wrote.

Ms. Escalante did not last long. She resigned on Dec. 15, 2019, citing health concerns, and sold her condo nine months later.

‘We should have started saving at least five years ago’
New board members took over in 2020 and managed to do what none of their predecessors had: They secured a $15 million line of credit to pay for the repairs identified by Mr. Morabito in 2018. The project’s cost had grown upon closer inspection and as time passed.

In a series of slide show presentations, the board bluntly laid out the reality. “We should have started saving at least five years ago,” said one from May 28, 2020. An October 2020 presentation said further inspections had shown that the waterproofing problems over the garage were far more widespread than initially thought: “This has exposed the garage to water intrusion for 40 years.”

Despite its financial challenges, the building, with its close-up view of the South Florida surf, was desirable in the booming market, according to Andres Paredes, a real estate agent involved in a 2020 unit sale.

The condo management openly released details of the planned multimillion-dollar restoration to prospective buyers, he said. Even with the assessments that would surely be needed to cover the cost of repairs, Unit 202 seemed like a good investment to a New York couple. The price was $460,000.

Longtime residents, like Ms. Blasser, had already borne the brunt of repeated special assessments for other repairs. One of them, which had been intended for hallway renovations in 2016, had instead been repurposed to address budget shortfalls and help finance the big 40-year repairs.

They would have to dig deep for more money: Each unit would have to pay between $80,000 and about $200,000, either up front or in monthly installments.

No one was happy about it.

“It’s an upscale building, but it’s not the Ritz or the Four Seasons,” he said. “The people that live there aren’t Rockefellers or Rothschilds. We’re upper middle class, I guess, and a lot of us are retired.”

When a neighbor knocked on his door, 705, with a petition against the assessment, Mr. Rosenthal signed it. The first payment was due on July 1.

Interesting NYT article about their struggle to agree to agree to all the special assessment charges to pay for repairs. It's paywall. I'm not sure but maybe NYT's still allows a few free articles a month?

Edited: It's looks like you have to register to get your free articles. I put part of the article in behind a spoiler.

But unless the state\city\county gets more active, who is going to force the association to set aside the money and do timely repairs?

Floridians aren't really in love with having the government telling them what they have to do.

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by Chief Pagan

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/u...-collapse.html

Spoiler!

SURFSIDE, Fla. — Elena Blasser kept her two-bedroom, two-bath condo in the Champlain Towers South as a beachside gathering place for family reunions. She adored the ocean and the small town of Surfside, Fla., because they reminded her of homes in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

She sank at least $100,000 into renovations when she bought Penthouse 11 a little more than a decade ago. Then the complex’s problems began. Hairline cracks in the pool deck. Newly painted walls that chipped easily. Water pooling in the garage. To pay for it all, the monthly maintenance fees and special assessments grew.

“We’re paying those fees and where are they going?” Ms. Blasser, a 64-year-old former schoolteacher, kept telling her family and neighbors, according to her son Pablo Rodriguez.

Little did she know that the problems identified in the building were about to get much worse. A consultant’s report commissioned in 2018 had identified serious problems of crumbling concrete and corroded rebar — problems that engineers warned had already led to “major structural damage.”

Fixing it, the condo board eventually concluded, would cost an estimated $15 million. Ms. Blasser would have to come up with another $120,000 to pay her share.

Long before half of the Champlain Towers South crumpled to the ground on June 24, killing at least 24 people and leaving up to 121 unaccounted for — including Ms. Blasser and her mother, Elena Chavez, 88 — the rancor over how the building was run by its condominium association was an open secret known to the relatives and friends of the people who lived there, and even to residents of other nearby buildings.


Pablo Rodriguez said his mother, Elena Blasser, broke into tears when she was asked to pay another special assessment.

It coexisted with the joys of the otherwise congenial community of condo dwellers who had been sold on the Florida dream of waterfront bliss. Emma Guara, 4, would stop John Turis, 76, by the pool to play with Leela, his Cavalier King Charles spaniel, when he was in town from Brooklyn. Ana and Juan Mora would swing by a neighbor’s unit on the 10th floor to see if she needed anything. Younger residents would look out for older ones when they waded into the ocean.

By the time the board members entrusted by their neighbors with overseeing the building hired an engineer to tell them what they had long suspected — that their aging condo was in dire need of top-to-bottom repairs — the meetings at the 13-story complex had developed a toxic reputation.

“People said, ‘Oh my God, thank God you’re not at the board meeting,’” Sharon Schechter recalled. “‘There’s screaming and yelling.’”

Tense stalemates delayed any decisions as the board became a hothouse of grievance over who was to blame, according to interviews with survivors of the collapse, former residents, relatives of the missing, lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

Ms. Blasser’s frustration grew each year, Mr. Rodriguez said. In 2017, she paid $60,000 for a special assessment to help make repairs. Then came the latest one, Mr. Rodriguez said, breaking into tears.

“She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe we have to do this again,’” he said.

In April, fed up, Ms. Blasser reached out to a real estate agent about selling her condo and was told it would sell quickly for close to a million dollars.


The 2018 engineering report from Frank P. Morabito, the consulting engineer, was deeply troubling. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of failing, but he estimated that repairs would cost more than $9 million.



“Sadly a few of our residents have undermined our progress with petty challenges, discrediting the board members and management,” they said.

Mr. Turis, a real estate and mortgage broker in New York who bought Unit 409 in 2005 so his daughter could live in it while she attended college, said the building had been mired in turnover of board members and property managers.

“It was like nobody wanted the job,” he said. “It seemed like nobody ever lasted more than two years.”

On Sept. 13, 2019, Graciela M. Escalante, who chaired the committee in charge of the 40-year recertification project, recommended hiring Mr. Morabito’s firm to carry out the work, even though his bid was the most expensive and initially led to what the selection committee admitted was “sticker shock.”

The next day, Anette Goldstein, the board president, and Nancy K. Levin, the vice president, both resigned, saying they were frustrated by last-minute objections that kept derailing progress on repairs.

“This pattern has repeated itself over and over, ego battles, undermining the roles of fellow board members, circulation of gossip and mistruths,” Ms. Goldstein wrote. “I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the functioning of our board and many before us, but it describes a board that works very hard but cannot for the reasons above accomplish the goals we set to accomplish.”

In all, six of seven board members resigned, five of them in the two weeks leading up to Oct. 3, 2019. At a board meeting that day, Ms. Escalante and others laid out a slew of concerns. She was elected the new president and, as the building official for the neighboring village of Bal Harbour, she had real expertise for the job.



“The building is falling apart,” he wrote to the board the following month, accusing the previous members of prioritizing renovations to common-area bathrooms over structural repairs.

“Somebody can seriously be injured or killed with the state of the concrete,” he wrote.

Ms. Escalante did not last long. She resigned on Dec. 15, 2019, citing health concerns, and sold her condo nine months later.

‘We should have started saving at least five years ago’
New board members took over in 2020 and managed to do what none of their predecessors had: They secured a $15 million line of credit to pay for the repairs identified by Mr. Morabito in 2018. The project’s cost had grown upon closer inspection and as time passed.

In a series of slide show presentations, the board bluntly laid out the reality. “We should have started saving at least five years ago,” said one from May 28, 2020. An October 2020 presentation said further inspections had shown that the waterproofing problems over the garage were far more widespread than initially thought: “This has exposed the garage to water intrusion for 40 years.”

Despite its financial challenges, the building, with its close-up view of the South Florida surf, was desirable in the booming market, according to Andres Paredes, a real estate agent involved in a 2020 unit sale.

The condo management openly released details of the planned multimillion-dollar restoration to prospective buyers, he said. Even with the assessments that would surely be needed to cover the cost of repairs, Unit 202 seemed like a good investment to a New York couple. The price was $460,000.

Longtime residents, like Ms. Blasser, had already borne the brunt of repeated special assessments for other repairs. One of them, which had been intended for hallway renovations in 2016, had instead been repurposed to address budget shortfalls and help finance the big 40-year repairs.

They would have to dig deep for more money: Each unit would have to pay between $80,000 and about $200,000, either up front or in monthly installments.

No one was happy about it.

“It’s an upscale building, but it’s not the Ritz or the Four Seasons,” he said. “The people that live there aren’t Rockefellers or Rothschilds. We’re upper middle class, I guess, and a lot of us are retired.”

When a neighbor knocked on his door, 705, with a petition against the assessment, Mr. Rosenthal signed it. The first payment was due on July 1.

Interesting NYT article about their struggle to agree to agree to all the special assessment charges to pay for repairs. It's paywall. I'm not sure but maybe NYT's still allows a few free articles a month?

Edited: It's looks like you have to register to get your free articles. I put part of the article in behind a spoiler.

But unless the state\city\county gets more active, who is going to force the association to set aside the money and do timely repairs?

Floridians aren't really in love with having the government telling them what they have to do.

Florida, like every other state\city\county, is already regulating the standards and sets building codes levels. Already telling their citizens and businesses you must ensure that “X” is up to snuff or you can’t sell or habitat that dwelling.