I saw that Twilight Zone episode! Creepy.
I would sure as hell want it to be a sick joke if that were my family, rather than a loved one trapped and terrified, futily calling every number they could over and over and over.
See also: On The Beach (non-supernatural occurrence).
https://www.yahoo.com/news/possible-failure-point-emerges-miami-115813207.html
Examination of the grainy video of the collapse shows that it started at the bottom, which lends credence to the hypothesis that the issues discovered three years ago might be the cause. And, as mentioned previously:
One other clue that a problem started at the bottom of the building: Immediately before the collapse, one of the residents saw a hole of sorts opening near the pool.
Michael Stratton said his wife, Cassie Stratton, who is missing, was on the phone with him and was looking out through the window of her fourth-floor unit when, she told him, the hole appeared. After that, the call cut off.
When I first heard this, my thought was that it was the phone shorting out and calling one of the preset numbers or redial. But most phones that have that functionality need power. I would guess the power to the building has been cut. Are there any POTS phones which just use the telephone line for power that also have preset/redial functionality? Perhaps the regular phone line is still active and it’s dialing out that way somehow. It could be the grandparents have been using the same phone for decades and maybe there was a phone a long time ago which just got power from the POTS line.
I agree that there should not be rush to assign fault; that’s what due process is all about: ensuring ample consideration of the facts and the law before assigning blame.
However, if Mr Prieto did in fact downplay the warning contained in the engineer’s report, with the effect of encouraging the condo board not to take it urgently, then he potentially bears a considerable responsibility, and thus the municipality as well.
It’s not scapegoating to assign due responsibility for one’s actions.
It could just be a reflection, but in the original footage of the collapse, it looks like lights can be seen to go out in the easternmost part during the fall.
Yeah, there are single line phones with memory and redial features that use only power from POTS. They’re not even uncommon. Pretty much any corded phone. It’s hard to imagine how telephone lines could be intact though.
What is “POTS” please?
Plain Old Telephone Service
Here’s a link to the engineering report.
I’m familiar with reports like this, having been on the board of a building with similar construction. The problems with the pool deck waterproofing are on page 7 of the report. I have read pages 1-6 and the issues reported on those pages are absolutely routine, and not uncommon in that type of building.
There are things in the section of the report that talks about the pool deck waterprooofing that I can’t figure out. It sounds to me like they were already aware of the issue and had some sort of plan to address it, and the consulting engineer is disagreeing with that plan and recommending another course of action.
The two sentences that a being referenced in the news reports read “The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete slab beneath these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in these area will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to increase exponentially”. Those sentences are sort of buried in this section of page 7 of the report, amid lots of discussion about how difficult and expensive the repair will be, and they also mention that it’s a common issue in this type of structure.
Has any other similar structure ever collapsed because of slab deterioration caused by standing water? I’m curious, but I don’t really think that’s a foreseeable consequence of that type of problem.
I confess, if I read that in an engineering report, I d think……this could be a problem. The slab might become uneven and cause the tiles on the pool deck to crack and buckle. If the underside of the slab was exposed to the parking garage, dust and pebbles might crumble off and damage cars. But I would NEVER think —— this is a problem that might make the building fall down, and I would’ve rolled my eyes if anyone had suggested that.
I look forward to finding out what happened, but I’m not sure that this is the cause, I’m still skeptical that standing water on a concrete slab could cause enough deterioration to bring down the building. It’s just that this is a common problem, unlike buildings falling down.
As was mentioned, POTS is Plain Old Telephone Service. For any youngsters out there, these are the older phones which had a telephone wire that plugged into a telephone port in the wall. They don’t have a normal electrical plug. They get their power from the telephone line. The telephone wires are run independently from electrical lines. If a telephone wire stayed intact during the collapse, it’s possible that an older style phone is still getting power. I would expect that the responders would do stuff like cut off electricity and gas for safety reasons, but they wouldn’t really need to worry about the telephone lines. They have such little power on them that there’s no real risk of getting shocked.
Thanks.
It could also be the water from the firefighting efforts pooling there, whether or not pool water is also involved. Probably not in the forefront of most people’s minds, but one of the gravest dangers in combatting a major fire at sea is not simply the danger from the fire itself, or the smoke, but from all the water being pumped into compartments not meant to be occupied by large amounts of water affecting stability. Which is to say that whatever water gets used for firefighting will end up somewhere, probably not far from where the fire is. Pooling in the lower-level parking areas sounds about right.
Jackmannii:
That law firm is boasting on its website that it’s the first to file suit over the collapse.
My brother the lawyer:
Everybody hates lawyers until they need one.
I suspect the city is going to own this when the dust settles. I would place my money on red (or in this case a park).
That would be ideal.
But most POTS-line phones do not have fancy features like directories and redial. Most of them. A portable handset, though, might have enough battery to transmit to the base, which might have enough POTS-line juice to relay the call. Presumably the handset would have gotten separated from the base, otherwise it could not make calls (every handset I have ever owned hangs up when set on the base).
I had a POTS phone that had redial and directories, powered by AA batteries inside the phone. Did not require mains power. About 20 years ago…
No, most of them do have redial, memory, and speed dial. Most of them use alkaline batteries to power those electronics with battery life of months or even years. Some features may work even without batteries.
AT&T CL2909, for example, available for overnight delivery from Amazon, and probably in stock at your local Staples. Manual doesn’t list redial as one of the features that don’t work without batteries installed.
I still have one in my bedroom.You access the “directory” by hitting one of 10 physical buttons. At some point, I would guess most of them did.