I have no doubt…but still, if you’ve got some irreplaceable stuff in there it still is gonna hurt. I bet more than a few would gamble with their lives over certain things. Hell, do we know if any pets are stranded in there?
Yes. There were pets left behind. I don’t have any details and probably don’t want any but yesterday authorities were talking about trying to look for anyone who might have been left behind in the still-standing parts and then mentioned pets.
I don’t know what CDI needs to do to get their explosives into the correct locations…but I know if I was one of the engineers I’d find it near impossible not to start corralling any critters that I had an opportunity to come across.
Or perhaps he meant kinetic energy:
In classical mechanic, the kinetic energy of an object of mass m traveling at a speed v is = 1 / 2 m v 2
One way or the other, enough to crush anything between the roof and the ground to death.
The price, availability, and sophistication isn’t quite there yet for typical use, but if there were a truly priceless artifact up there, it could be retrieved with robots like the Boston Robotics Spot (+Arm):
It can climb up stairs, open doors, and grab items. If they were cheap enough, and there were a bunch of people trained in their use, you could have a small army of them retrieve the most valuable items. Maybe in 10 years or so they’ll be ready for this sort of thing. Good luck wrangling a cat… though just opening the door might be enough of a chance for some pets.
You were right to be confused.
The use of the word “sublet” is specific to cooperative ownership, in which you actually own a certain number of shares in the corporation that owns the building, and those shares entitle you to a perpetual “lease” on your apartment in exchange for paying your common charges each month. It’s an ownership structure common in NYC and rare elsewhere. So when I rent out my apartment it’s technically a sublet, I call it a sublet, and locals understand what I mean.
But it’s confusing to everyone else.
If the building is structurally sound enough to allow people to sift through the rubble next to it it’s sound enough to let the tenants retrieve their possessions.
This guy made a simulation of how he thinks the condos collapsed. Even if it’s not correct, I found it helpful to be able to understand the remaining structures in the rubble pictures.
There’s another building a few miles away in Miami Beach that was ordered evacuated because of concern that it was similarly at risk. I wonder how much time the residents were given? Enough time to get a couple of suitcases together?
The residents were given short notice to evacuate by midnight. So it appears it would depend on what time of the day they got in touch with individual residents.
From the news report upthread, they were looking to evacuate over “two to three hours”, with authorities also saying they’d likely be staying around overnight to take care for letting in people who work late or otherwise couldn’t come back immediately. Other reports said that individuals were given “an hour or two”.
People who live in coastal zones in the hurricane belt are well advised to keep a “bugout kit” ready. That really should be a good measure for all of us, come to think of it.
Okay, thanks. I’m trying to imagine what I’d take given only an hour or two to do it, assuming I might never return.
The video still-shots showed the columns still standing in the pool deck area. The deck just punched through and was not column failure (in that area). If they had wrapped the columns in steel and welded load spreaders back in 2018 none of this would have happened.
I didn’t understand what I was looking at with early pictures of cars in the basement. Those are cars on the first floor that are parked on the intact floor that punched through the columns. the fire we see was likely started and fed by gasoline in crushed cars.
I wonder if going forward engineers isolate the columns of underground garages from building columns so they are effectively separate structures. If the decking pulled or damaged the building columns of the collapsed building then it’s lucky it didn’t do the same for the remaining structure. The decking that collapsed with the cars on it is under the intact building.
I’m sure that there will be renewed short-term focus on building inspections. But back in 2007, it seemed unfathomable that an interstate bridge could collapse into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people and injuring 145. There were loud calls for additional federal investment in our crumbling infrastructure. And yet here we are 14 years later, maybe getting around to passing an infrastructure bill that will address a fraction of the need.
It doesn’t have to be coastal areas. I put one together while watching a line of tornado laden storms approach (It dropped 15 in a very small area). When I heard a wall of wind hit my house I grabbed the cat and the kit and ran for the basement. The lights went out as I opened the basement door but the kit had a flashlight. The kit now sits partially loaded in my bedroom with important docs nearby.
If you have 30 minutes, the video that pops up next seems to do a great job of piecing together what happened just based on the evidence available. Really fascinating.
ETA: This one Here's Cause Of Miami Condo Collapse Champlain Condo Towers, Surfside - YouTube
The difference in this case is that private capital is at stake. If you’re an insurance company or prospective buyer, you want to know whether the property you’re paying for is on solid ground.
That’s an amazing video, explaining this theory of the collapse purely visually in two minutes with perfect clarity without a single spoken word.
I was surprised to hear him say he was an engineer. I think he missed some things. First, the columns in the garage are smaller because they’re not holding up a building. And if that is a building column in the background that he claims is too thin he failed to point out it’s still standing.
Also, at the beginning of the video he’s pointing to something he claims is a fallen piece of “something”. It looks like the sign from earlier street views. And finally, the shear line on the last part to fall looks like it’s between the 2 white lines and not the other side of them. You can clearly see the inner striped section falling first.
But the video has some good still shots. The one that struck me was the view of cars under the intact section (column with parking number 72). The garage ceiling punched through and left all the rebar in place. I’m not an engineer but it doesn’t look like there is much in the way of load transfer from deck to support column. Certainly not the spaghetti strings of rebar.