We’re you surprised they’re saying this happened at 1 AM?
The surveillance footage of the collapse is brightly lit. I thought it was a cloudy day or sunrise. The news was reporting 1AM and that seemed wrong. They must have very bright street lighting there.
On CNN this morning, they keep showing a new video with water falling from an elevated area (looked to me like a garage). If that’s an indication of an unstable building, I fear that there may be many more buildings in that area that are compromised. For the month that I was in Surfside, one building in particular (around 92nd and Collins) had water spilling out just about every day that I walked by it.
No, security lighting can be quite bright, especially in urban areas. Also, it’s possible for security cameras to adjust to low lighting - that’s why such images are often grayscale and/or grainy.
Context is important.
A single broken pipe does not mean the building is about to fall down. However, that wasn’t just a broken pipe, there was also debris on the ground under it, which is another indication that there is Something Very Wrong Here.
Latest is that work has been paused at the site due to concerns about the stability of what’s left of the building. Apparently there have been movements and shift of 6-12 inches (15-30 cm). Of course, there is also more bad weather moving in.
In addition, the Building Integrity channel has a new video on the recently broadcast security footage mentioned up thread.
If you don’t want to watch the video: it’s yet more evidence that the collapse started on the pool deck and the three columns at the very front of the building. He does touch on the fact that more than one eye witness mentioned that was where the collapse started, this provides additional objective support for their observations.
I was discussing this with my wife the other night. I think this is going to end up being a situation where everyone will go looking for someone to blame/sue and they won’t find anyone because unfortunately those most responsible for this are already dead. It’s pretty clear that the leadership of the condo board tried to do the right thing, for years, and the residents themselves prevented the repairs and they are now dead as a result.
This building was 4 decades old, located several hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean smack dab in the middle of hurricane alley. It probably needed major repairs 10-15yrs ago that were ignored. I think many condo owners feel it less like owning a house and more like living in an apartment complex where there is a landlord who makes sure everything gets done and everything is someone elses problem. I’m sorry if you finally paid off your condo a few years ago, you still have to pay to maintain it just like any other homeowner. If I build a house I’m not going to be surprised to have to make major repairs multiple times over a 40yr period. I may not like paying $30k to replace my roof but if its leaking/structurally unsound I don’t have a choice. I may have to take out a home equity loan to pay for it. Condo owners aren’t special.
I’m sure the former board president is breathing a sigh of relief that she left a long, seemingly unambiguous, paper trail of her efforts to prevent this. Same goes for the engineer that did the inspections. Seems he did an extremely thorough job and should be safe as well. I’m sure lawyers and internet sleuths are going to comb through every line and find some things that were missed/could have been done in hindsight and try to sue everyone but at the end of the day you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. This horse was lead to water but wouldn’t drink.
I don’t know about that. I mean, I sort of maybe agree with most of what you say, bu I am less confident that the author of the 2018 engineering report is off the hook. In part because what is going to be deemed “reasonable” (not negligent) for lay people might come down to whether they were clearly warned of the risk.
Bearing in mind that we don’t know why the building collapsed, entertaining a hypothetical only here, supposing the cause of the collapse is found to be associated with the deficiencies reported in 2018? Okay. So the engineer found them. Great. But that doesn’t necessarily absolve the engineer. The follow-on question is… did the engineer properly assess the severity of the danger based on what they saw, and did they then convey that information to the condo association or whatever entity hired him for the report, in language that they might reasonable understand to convey the intended message?
It’s one thing to identify damage. It’s another to identify the risk of imminent or near-term catastrophic failure that may result in mass deaths. It’s another still to convey that information to descisionmakers so that they may act upon it.
And then there’s the city–although with the city I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some statute that would prevent the city from being sued on the grounds that it doesn’t owe a duty to property owners to keep them from dying for lack of maintenance on their own property. However, since the city does apparently have this 40-year inspection/recertification requirement, and one of its representatives apparently had a chance to review the report and comment on it, it’s worth at least looking into whether maybe the city’s processes were inadequate or not followed. I mean, again, if the damage was so severe as to potentially make the condo association negligent for not fixing it (still TBD, just saying, hypothetically), then why didn’t the city step-in and condemn the property?
I think those are the most intriguing legal/engineering questions. On the policy side, I’ll just note that I think this incident may end up providing a case study in why societies built on ideals of voluntary association without government coercion may not hold up in practice.
ETA: One last random thought on the condo association, just ignoring for a moment that it is made up of owners and probably doesn’t have deep pockets of its own. Seeing as this all stemmed from a 40-year inspection that was actually started at the 37-year point, that may further undercut a claim that the association was negligent: by rights, they didn’t even need to have the recertification completed until just this year. So how can they be blamed (I could imagine an attorney for them arguing) for a collapse that occurred still within the inspection window? I mean, sure, they had 3 years to act on the information, but even ignoring feet-dragging by fellow-owners and the pandemic causing delays, but factor in the lack of clear/explicit warning that the damage might lead to a catastrophic failure if not fixed in the near term, and, gosh, how were these poor lay-folks supposed to know urgent action was needed to prevent loss of life?
This collapse is a case-study justification for a statutory requirement that all condo associations have to maintain a substantial maintenance reserve fund, based on annual assessments on each condo owner. I’m shocked that’s not a requirement, as @FinsToTheLeft pointed out upthread.
From my “don’t know anything about this kind of thing” point of view, I am wondering why they are not finding people more frequently.
Can anyone help me understand why this is?
Because they’re not people any more. They’re smushed meat.
But they are finding people (whole people). They found 4 or so in the last couple days.
If there are 140 or so people that were in the building when it collapsed, my “know nothing” POV says that they should be finding 4-6 per day.
Sometimes they say, “we have found X bodies and human remains”. I do wonder what, exactly, is meant by “human remains”. Can those remains be attributed to any of the missing so the “recovered” count can go up?
But if they had to have the recertification by this year, know about the deterioration in ample time to fix it, and don’t, would they get recertified?
*shrug * I don’t know. That sounds awfully speculative. Too speculative to award damages, your honor. 
I’m just curious how firm that 40 year recertification rule is.
I was wondering the same thing. In my original draft of that particular sentenced, I wrote, “they didn’t even need to have the inspection completed until just this year.” It occurred to me I didn’t actually know that. Is it that the building has to be inspected every 40 years, with corrective action to follow, or is it that it has to be recertified every 40 years, with corrective action complete?
Not super important to the thread, but if I were not only not not a lawyer (in other words, IANAL), but specifically a lawyer looking to pin something on the condo association or elected board members, I’d want to know the specifics, and I’d want to know how long it typically takes to correct deficiencies in similar buildings following similar inspections.
And as absurd as the idea of suing the condo association may seem at first glance (like the victims suing themselves), it’s less absurd if we consider (as someone mentioned upthread) the possibility of renters or vacationers or relatively new buyers who didn’t have the same opportunity to make informed (or not, still TBD on that) risk decisions.
Plus, suing the condo board and members triggers the insurance they carried.
It was a chaotic collapse. Some remains are going to be more intact than others. Some will be more-or-less intact bodies that can be fairly readily identified. Some are going to be dismembered parts. Some will simply be, as awful as it is, disparate smears.
DNA analysis will help, but in real life, you need a reference sample, and entire families were obliterated in the collapse. It’s going to take quite a while to sift through all the rubble, recover the recoverable remains, get reference specimens from surviving family members, and process everything.
As mentioned upthread, that will also be slowed down by “false positives”, like pieces of pork from someone’s fridge being collected as potential human remains.
Some victims might not have close genetic relations, at least not ones accessible to investigators - there were a number of foreign nationals known to be residing in the building. And some victims simply might not have left large enough remains to meaningfully collect - small chunks could be washed away or disintegrate in the water from leaks, firefighting, and rain.
It’s likely that at least some victims are simply never going to be positively identified.
I believe there are still human remains from the collapse of the World Trade Center in Manhattan that have never been identified. I believe they’re being preserved in the hope that technology in the future will allow them to be.
Some of those remains are thought to be of the hijackers. Their family members have refused to provide DNA samples.
God, what a horrible presentation. Is this the quality of the future? Write a script first, dude! Get your visual aids set first! There’s no rush.
And he never links to the shots post-collapse that show a huge chunk of the pool deck collapsed. What if that happened before the collapse? What if this area collapsed many minutes before, maybe the cause of the water and debris, and ultimatey the cause of the collapse (as opposed to a result of the collapse)?
I think “several hundred” yards from the ocean is misleading. The torn open bedrooms in the remaining part of the building are around 180 yards from water. The fallen part of the building was as close as 140. To me, “several” means “more than 2”, which barely gets to the street side face of the building. This place was effectively right on the beach.