Four people are dead and dozens are missing after a condo collapsed near Miami. Here's what experts think caused the deadly collapse. RELATED:
Rescuers were searching for survivors in the rubble Friday after a 40-year-old South Florida beachside condo building collapsed, killing at least four people and leaving 159 unaccounted for.
Investigators were working to determine what caused part of the Champlain Towers South, a 12-story condominium, "pancaked" in the town of Surfside, Florida, shortly before 2 a.m. Thursday.
About half of the building's more than 130 units were affected, said Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
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actaully it looks like it fell from the bottom
Need more cranes and construction workers👉and lots of workers
been watching for two days, every clip shows like three guys randomly staring at the rubble with no heavy machinery
The failure of one or two of bottom columns or column foundations may cause that collapse.
That was my first observation also. Columns could have been hit by vehicles once or over a period of time.
The rebar inside the concrete rusts and swells, cracking the concrete around it. You can see everywhere where the rebar has separated from the concrete. You can even see where the rebar was pulled right out of the concrete.
@Tim Gates The IRC, international residential code, is pretty silent on placing concrete compared to the IBC for commercial concrete placement. The ACI 318 concrete code could spell things out much better. Residential concrete structures are more important than commercial because people are asleep and imobile for considerable periods of time in them by design. I’d be interested to know if this was an IBC project and what the engineering on the structural pages had. I bet the issue is a soils engineering one. Was there solid native bearing soil for the footings?
@T D I was still in high school when that building was built, so I don’t know what building codes were used. Pilings were driven to refusal when I started in construction a few years later. But in the early 90’s the building codes along the beach required the rebar to be incased in epoxy resin to prevent it from rusting. And to prove the point to you naysayers, take a trip to the beach in Florida and you’ll notice no bridges from the 70’s or 80’s are around any more.
@Tim Gates I’ve seen a study saying that in some situations epoxy coated rebar can suffer failure faster than non coated rebar because of nicks and holes in the epoxy. You guys sound like you know this stuff better than me…is this possible?
@Harry Cooper that’s a good question, I’ve moved to the middle of the US 10 years ago and haven’t been back to the beach to see how things are holding up.
@Tim Gates You can’t guarantee nothing at this point only speculate friend. I’m a retired commercial/residential contractor, so was my dad and my family owns a commercial demolition company in Hawaii. I do know what I’m talking about from decades of schooling and on job experience and I too can only speculate. I didn’t build the building or was there during construction and I’m sure you weren’t either. If salt air exposer before being poured was the only reason every building there and all over the world would fall and that’s not going to happen. Rebar is covered with wet concrete, bridge are poured right in salt water, and yes I know about rust and swelling. The only time I have ever seen a building fall like this was in a controlled demo. BUT understand I’m NOT saying that is what happened. After cleaning up the CCTV footage and examine it frame by frame, buildings don’t dont just collapse like this, it’s very rare. So everything is speculation at this point.
what were those big industrial looking things on top of the roof?
Air handelers conditioners and ducts.
Maybe it was from a sinking foundations and so luckily no other bigger or higher high rise condos sitting on that particular spot it could’ve been worse
I believe that it’s the ground “Sinking !!” Just like the Bridge in Washington that was Struck by a pickup truck !!
This building was built on the fla outer banks ,, nuff said right there,..geo unstable
Just go to YouTube comments section for all the Structural Engineers – entire investigation already done
Well, that doesn’t bother me as much as all of the the anonymous armchair conspiracy crackpot nutjobs with their conspiracehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhssss!!! 🙂
The authorities should start investigating over here on the comment section, plenty of engineers, conspiracy makers, and experts that went to Google university.
lol. Are you going to give your 2 cents as to why it fell?
there are such things as micro vibrations
LOL
Sometimes you don’t need to be an engineer to understand what happened…
It’s called the Swiss cheese effect all the holes in the cheese finally lineup🤔
Every time we listen to the so called experts, we are lied to.
Go figure,!
Yep. This sounds like a way to detour the public on what could’ve been the “reason”. It looked like a demolition & that’s that
Is your doctor an expert?
they are all worried about liability… I.E. being sued by the city or private companies who were responsible for inspecting, maintaining and repairing the structure.
Another book: why structures don’t fall.
If you had to take somebody out, this would be a great way to do it… Break into several condo’s near the ground floor, some C4, strategically placed, and the job is done…
Reminds me of the Sampoong Shopping Mall collapse. Many small changes led to a failure from the roof on down, resulting in catastrophic failure.
Yeah it’s quite similar. Both collapsed the same way.
According to a 2018 report, structural damage. The owner didn’t want to pay the expensive repairs. They should’ve moved those residents out in 2018
I think it’s likely that one of the support pillars buckled, causing stress to other pillars and ultimately one of the floors to follow suit, then the whole building. That’s what happened to Hotel New World in Singapore in 1978. We have implemented strict requirements and inspections of all buildings since then. But this is in 2021, how could this happen?
Exactly why I never lived in a hi rise! I don’t have that much trust in anyone! People will put your and your families life on the line just to save money!
Same as with most airplane crashes. It’s a number of different things going wrong, no one thing would cause disaster, but combined they lead to catastrophic failure.
There are thousands of buildings by the ocean. Entire cities have buildings by the ocean around the world, like Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong, to name only a couple: salt water, etc, does not cause any of these buildings to collapse. But building on what’s erroneously, and misleadingly called “barrier” islands is very risky business, and on top of that, represents a catastrophic environmental damage. These islands are MIGRATING islands, and that is what they should be called, because the term more accurately describes the type of geological land formation that they are. Surfing Island IS a migrating island: call it for what it is, and many people might think twice before buying million dollar + properties, simply because they want to live in “exclusive” resorts. Migrating islands should belong to the National Park system, and should be public lands. But developers and city officials will not pass up such lucrative enterprises, even if it costs lives!