Reading between the lines of the Times story this morning it sounds like the condo association dragged their feet for two years on the repairs, but were finally about to start. As said, $15 M is quite a lump of money. My condo association has less than $100 K. Bad decision, but entirely understandable.
I predicted sinkhole in an earlier post. Not exactly wrong, but not exactly right either.
My bad: it was ad walled not pay walled
what’s “ad walled”?
First I’ve heard the term, but many sites require the ad blocker to be turned off.
ad walled means your adblock has to be turned off for that site in order to view it.
Huh, the woman in @ Johnny_L.A’s link yelled to her husband the pool was collapsing. Yet it appears intact in the Daily Mail story above.
Would you feel safe in the CT north? I would not! Yet some are staying until mandatory evacuation orders. To me the towers N. S. & E. are a throuple, two go down and one remains and the reasoning that I’ve read is CT N is " a block" away" from the collapse. No it’s not a block away it’s up against your backside right next door.
The space to the left of that picture and the pool: is that all that’s left of the collapsed section of the building?
Yes but if you look at the area to the right of the pool that section has collapsed. That lines up with the center of the building that collapsed first. So she may have been describing the pool area and not the pool itself. What she would have seen is a big dust cloud around the pool. And remember, this happened at night. Unless she was staring directly at the area her eye would have been drawn to the dust cloud.
The section closest to the ocean collapsed next. I’m more and more amazed the whole thing didn’t come down and I’d be really concerned of how stable it is now. It’s not just a function of how intact the remaining supports are. the remaining structure has been subjected to a substantial shock wave that has to have weakened it.
I’d be seriously concerned about the buildings on either side of it. Did the basement walls contain most of the energy or was it transferred outward? If so, what was the rate of dispersion?
The rubble parallel to the length of the pool is the collapsed building (what the firefighters are spraying water on).
looking at Google Maps the building next to it was going up in 2018. If they drove pylons into the ground would the vibration from it accelerate the cracks in the cement structure?
One thing I noticed about the engineering report is that it didn’t really give a timeframe for when repairs were necessary. It says that repairs were needed in the “near future” to prevent the deterioration from expanding exponentially, but what does that mean? Maybe they weren’t able to specify more than that, but unfortunately it’s all-too-easy to understand why a board faced with that kind of major expense would take a generous interpretation of the “near future.”
I had discussions with my late father about this. He was a corporate real estate lawyer who spent the last decade of his career as in house counsel for a major condo builder. My parents own a condo here in Toronto and rent one in Florida.
The biggest difference between the two jurisdictions is that in Ontario the reserve study needs to be periodically reviewed and assessments made to keep the reserve fund in line with expected repairs and replacements. Special assessments are still needed if costs exceed the plan. My mother in law is facing a $30k assessment for her building due to a more expensive than planned roof replacement.
In Florida, it’s entirely up to the condo association, so they don’t have to have funds at hand and can keep deferring maintenance until it’s too late. Keeping maintenance fees low is more important to the owners.
For some people most of their wealth might be tied up in that condo and they might not have anywhere else to go (although I heard on the TV today that local authorities are trying to help people in nearby buildings relocate). Some might be elderly and for them leaving their current home might be frightening, even as staying is frightening (people are not always rational). There might be denial.
Moving significant numbers of people is never as straightforward as you might think, or wish for.
Yes.
I’m sure there’s a lot of structural engineers and related sorts on site asking those exact same questions right now.
This angle is the most frightening. From the other angles, it just looks like a pile of rubble, but from this side you can see how it’s a pancake stack.
And its fascinating how it seems that the only recognizable piece in the rubble pile is the balcony railing, that all seem to have survived with their curved shape intact.
Well, metal is pretty tough. Also, that’s the part of the building that went down last and the way it fell those balcony railings would be on top of the pile or have the least amount of stuff on them. If it wasn’t so horrible it would be fascinating.
You’re likely looking at the remains of the penthouse unit(s) which had balconies along the entire length of the building. I would expect the railings below to be crushed flat.
Those pictures illustrate just how big the disaster area is.
I think it has collapsed into the underground parking below.
The balconies we see in those pictures would have been the balconies looking outward to the sea from the last-collapsed stack , that went down slightly inward due to the middle section leaving the void.
Looking at the video and at the “neater” stacking of the seaward section it would look like the middle section crumpled down from courtyard to outer wall, and then the one-segment-wide seaside section panckaked down because theor floors were now mostly or even completely unsupported on the landward side.
And yes, if the chain of the collapse started in the infrastructure beneath the ground level deck, to an observer from above the simple way of describing it would have been that it looked like the pool area in general was sinking. The pool itself stayed close to where it was because its walls and load-bearing members would have extended down into what would have been the void beneath the deck, so that bit did not just crumple.
From the GMaps aerial, Champlain East and Champlain North are next-door neighbors of each other, and then they are separated from Champlain South by the Solara Surfside Bluegreen timeshare building. Champlain North looks like a “sister building” with a structure very similar though not completely identical (looks like one studio’s width shorter on the long side). Champlain East, not so much (quite a bit smaller), plus the streetview pictures seem to show Champlain East had more recent renovations (though that may or may not involve structural aspects).