‘You don’t see buildings falling down in America.’

 

‘You don’t see buildings falling down in America.’ So why did Surfside tower crumble?

BY AARON LEIBOWITZ, SARAH BLASKEY, LINDA ROBERTSON, AND JAY WEAVER Miami Herald

A surveillance camera from a nearby building caught the exact moment part of Champlain Towers South Condo collapsed on June 24. BY TWITTER

Before tragedy struck Thursday, the possibility of a residential condo tower in Miami-Dade County collapsing without warning seemed almost preposterous. Inspections and sound building practices were supposed to ward off such catastrophes. People were supposed to go to sleep at night knowing their homes were structurally sound.

But after the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside partially collapsed early Thursday, leaving rescue workers scrambling to save lives and account for more than 100 missing people amid the rubble, speculation ran wild and questions loomed large: How could this happen? Could it happen again?

There are no official answers yet. Those could take days — or much longer — to emerge. As of Thursday evening, Surfside town officials had not yet released any public records that could shed light on potential problems at the building.

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Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told reporters he was as stunned as anyone.

“It’s less likely than a lightning strike,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen. You don’t see buildings falling down in America.”

Condo Collapse: Disaster in Surfside

Get the latest news on the collapse of the Champlain Towers South Condo near Miami Beach.

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Several engineering experts, speaking from experience and reviewing chilling surveillance footage that showed the northeast, beachfront portion of the building collapsing around 1:20 a.m. Thursday, suggested a number of factors could have played a role, including saltwater corroding the concrete and potentially weakening beams that hold up the structure.

But while a critical, county-mandated process designed to catch any serious structural damage was underway at the Champlain Towers South, it was not yet complete. The 12-story, 136-unit building was erected in 1981 and was still early in its recertification process, which is required for most non-single-family structures countywide once they turn 40 years old.

In response to a Herald request for 40-year inspection documents, Town Clerk Sandra N. McCready said the town has not yet received any from the building owners.

“While the Champlain Towers had begun the 40-year recertification process, the 40-year inspection report had not yet been generated or submitted to the Town,” McCready said in an email.

The engineer retained by the Champlain towers as part of the recertification process was Frank Morabito, according to an attorney for the building’s condo association. Morabito could not be reached for comment Thursday.

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The Herald has also requested construction permits, blueprints and architectural plans, and records of any building inspections or code violations logged by the town.

RECERTIFICATION PROCESS WAS UNDERWAY

The recertification process mandates that, once a structure turns 40, its owners must hire a registered architect or professional engineer to do electrical and structural inspections within 90 days of receiving official notice from the town.

If repairs are found to be necessary, the owner gets 150 days to complete them. The costs of repairs can be apportioned among the unit owners. And if the town’s building official determines the building to be unsafe, the case gets forwarded to the county’s Unsafe Structures Board for review.

Buildings then repeat that process every 10 years after the initial 40-year review.

After Thursday’s condo collapse along the beach in Surfside, a massive search-and-rescue effort involved dozens of crews from across Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Al Diaz ADIAZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM

“The bottom line is that’s not an old building, and 40-year inspection or not, that kind of thing should not be happening,” said Burkett, the mayor.

It’s not clear what stage the review process had reached and whether anything had been flagged at Champlain towers, which consist of three adjacent buildings near 88th Street and Collins Avenue.

But Town Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer told the Herald that the Champlain South building’s roof was being redone, and that James McGuinness, the town’s building official, had been there just a day earlier to monitor the progress.

Salzhauer added that the Champlain North building is almost identical to the South building, and she worried whether residents in the north tower might also be in danger.

“The loss of human life is horrible,” Salzhauer said. “But it’s also important to know why this happened, and what we can do to prevent this from happening again.”

WAS THE BUILDING SINKING?

Some have speculated that the problems could have started in the ground, but the author of a paper showing that the Champlain Tower building sunk at a slightly faster rate than its neighboring buildings, a process known as subsidence, cautioned that his research was a mere snapshot in time.

The April 2020 research paper compared subsidence in Norfolk, Virginia, to Miami Beach and found that Miami Beach experienced very little subsidence overall. FIU professor Shimon Wdowinski and his co-author found Champlain Tower sunk into the ground at a rate of about two millimeters a year from 1993 to 1999.

“It was not that significant, we’ve seen much higher than that. But it stood out because most of the area was stable and showed no subsidence. This was a very localized area of subsidence,” he said. “We saw the movement in the 1990s. It’s not what you see today. You can extrapolate, maybe.”

Wdowinski said land subsidence alone would not cause a building to collapse.

Jeff Rose, a Surfside resident and contractor whose parents live in the building — and who, thankfully, were in Colorado when it collapsed — said he has performed condo renovations for various units in the building. Rose said work on the roof started about six weeks ago, and said concrete restoration was also underway to repair old or damaged concrete.

But Rose said he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary there.

“I didn’t notice anything I haven’t seen in many other buildings in South Florida,” Rose said.

Salzhauer said one resident of Champlain South told her that, while construction was being done over the past few years on the building next door — 8701 Collins Ave., known as Eighty Seven Park — the Champlain structure was “shaking” and there were “cracks” in the building as a result.

Norma Arbide, who has lived in the North tower since 1987, told the Herald the construction next door caused tenants to complain about shaking in their building last year.

“The tenants in South were complaining a lot because their building was shaking and vibrating when they were digging and blasting at the construction site,” Arbide said.

The maximum building height in Surfside is 12 stories. Eighty Seven Park, which is located in Miami Beach, is 18 stories tall.

Rose and Salzhauer said residents at Champlain also had concerns about water leaking from a second-floor pool deck into the parking garage below.

It wasn’t clear Thursday whether those issues had anything to do with the collapse of the beach-facing portion of the condo, which affected about 55 apartment units. By evening, 99 people were still unaccounted for, officials said.

‘CONCRETE CANCER’

Greg Batista, a professional engineer from Davie who specializes in concrete repair projects, said that after watching the Surfside condo tower collapsing to rubble in online videos, one potential structural flaw jumped out at him.

“Concrete spalling.” Here’s what it means.

Batista said that when salt water seeps into porous concrete, it causes the reinforced steel rods known as rebar in the support beams to rust and expand. In turn, the expansion breaks up the concrete and that weakens the beams.

It’s like “concrete cancer” spreading, said Batista, who worked on the planter boxes on the pool deck behind the south tower in 2017.

“Once the cancer spreads, the concrete breaks up and becomes weaker and weaker as time goes on,” Batista said. “My best guess is that’s what happened here. This building has a garage on the lower floors. If you have one column subjected to spalling, the No. 1 suspect here, it could fail. That one beam could bring down the whole building like a domino effect.”

Scores remained missing late Thursday after the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South Condo in Surfside. David Santiago DSANTIAGO@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Batista, who has worked as an engineer in South Florida for 30 years, said that older condo buildings, apartment complexes and hotels near the ocean routinely deteriorate from exposure to salt water and other elements.

Atorod Azizinamini, chair of the FIU College of Engineering and Computing’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said such building collapses are exceedingly rare and usually involve a “perfect storm” of multiple factors.

“Usually these collapses are a result of some mistakes, maybe some negligence or some unusual events that might take place,” Azizinamini said.

Kevin DuBrey, the director of project management at Hillman Engineering in Fort Lauderdale — which has conducted 40-year inspections at other buildings — told the Herald that saltwater can get into the concrete of oceanfront buildings and corrode the steel inside.

He said he has inspected buildings where evacuations were needed because walls had to be replaced, but never because of the immediate potential for collapse.

“Usually buildings don’t get to that point,” he said. “Typically that would be something you’d probably know about in advance.”

While he was not familiar with the recertification at the Champlain Towers South, Batista said it has been his experience that South Florida condo associations often put off expensive structural improvements to their buildings because of the multimillion-dollar fees to pay for them.

“When an engineer says you need concrete repairs and it’s a structural issue, they should take them seriously,” Batista said. “I’ve seen it over and over again, and the can is just kicked down the road.”

Azizinamini, the FIU engineering chair, said Miami-Dade County should perhaps reassess its 40-year recertification process, especially for structures in coastal areas. Generally, building officials don’t inspect structures after they receive initial approvals to be built and before the 40-year mark, unless residents or owners flag specific concerns.

“I think we need to do a better job in our inspections,” he said.

Azizinamini said it could take “months” to determine what happened, a process that will involve investigators reviewing design plans, taking samples of concrete, talking to building designers and ultimately creating a computer model to simulate the collapse.

A ‘PANCAKE COLLAPSE’

What is commonly known as a “pancake” collapse looks eerily similar to what happens to a building when it is demolished with dynamite, said John Pistorino, an engineer with a 50-year career in Miami who was instrumental in writing the 40-year recertification policy and other building safety laws.

“Condo residents will be frantic but these buildings are built so strong for our South Florida coastal conditions and hurricanes that this should never happen and it must be something unique to that tower,” he said. “It is so dramatically unusual that it’s hard to compare to anything other than a building going down in a city in a state of war.”

Pistorino said his firm was receiving calls all day from alarmed clients who own or live in high-rises but that there would be no answers until after a forensic investigation.

“It’s a mystery right now but you can go to sleep at night because our buildings are designed with heavy safety factors,” he said. “We will find out what really happened.”

Previous building collapses with fatalities that he has investigated were caused by a combination of problems, Pistorino said.

“Was there ongoing settlement, shifting of the ground that affected the foundation? Spalling and contaminated concrete? A water table or flooding issue? An overloaded roof? Cracking caused by construction next door?” he said. “That’s all speculation at this stage and those explanations seem unlikely. This was a 40-year-old building and we’ve got lots of structures over 100 years old that will last indefinitely if they are maintained.”

Structural engineer and retired building inspector Gene Santiago said video of the Champlain collapse struck him as “really strange.”

“The perimeter columns seem to have failed first and dragged the rest with them,” he said. “I’ve seen it in demos where it pancakes downward — bam, bam, bam.”

Santiago recalled how mistakes, lack of inspection and construction worker errors caused the collapse of a South Miami parking garage and a Hialeah apartment building years ago but that those were under construction when they failed.

Some of the theories as to why the Champlain tower collapsed “don’t seem plausible at this early juncture,” he said.

“Salt can seep into the concrete, and I’ve been on inspections on the beach back in the 1970s where there was no reinforcing left, but that sort of concrete cancer is rare today and it takes years and you would notice it,” Santiago said. “Roofing material and equipment is heavy, but a catastrophic failure caused by overloading doesn’t seem logical.”

Santiago continued: “Pilings driven 40 feet down would not necessarily be a concern, depending on the foundation. And vibrations caused by heavy construction are felt by residents but if that caused cracks they would be evident. None of this would be invisible over time, especially in a condo where everyone is typically observant and vigilant in their complaints.”

Pistorino drafted the county’s building recertification rules after the 1974 collapse of a downtown office building leased by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“It was a 30-year-old building compromised by the corrosion of steel in our harsh environment and at least four people died as a result,” Pistorino said. “The concrete had salt in it, which rusted and expanded the columns and beams until they lost their support capacity. We said, ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?’ and decided to require inspections at 40 years and every 10 years after that. Since then, we also know exactly what to look for and how to do concrete restoration.”

The 1981 collapse of the Cocoa Beach Harbor Cay condominium that killed 11 workers when they were completing the roof was caused by errors in design, shoring and construction techniques and led state engineers to write the threshold building law that requires rigorous inspection during the construction process, Pistorino said, citing a number of local projects on which he has done repairs, inspections and investigations.

“There are protocols in place today that serve as an incentive for building owners to maintain the structure and envelope of a building,” he said. “Put your first priority on the structure, not the marble floors, and it will last.”

 

 My response to complaints about Q Anon:

Never ever forget this cruel fact, you need about $60.00 to stay afloat every day, forever, you can't skip a day and if you skip a week you might never recover. Ayn Rand warned "The lack of money is the root of all evil." Q Anon is meth or heroin to frightened desperate people, it's insanity and it's a kids defiance in the sadistic schoolyard of life. But it will fail. John Birch was the Q Anon of the 1950's. Huey Long was the Q Anon of the 1930's. All the way back to Washington in 1789 there have been bullshit and insanity. In the 2080's there will be some kind of bull shit. What is important is to never surrender to it. Desperation breeds desperate acts. Pay better wages, have rent control, and politicians who are not greedy bigots and America will calm down and get better.

David A Fairbanks

Reno, Nevada 22 June 2022

How the Father of Modern Policing ‘Abolished’ the Police

 

How the Father of Modern Policing ‘Abolished’ the Police

August Vollmer believed education is the key to good policing. Credit...Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

By Annalee Newitz

NY Times

Mx. Newitz is the author of “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.”

August Vollmer has been hailed by many in law enforcement as the father of modern American policing. He has also been criticized for pioneering the militarization of the police and espousing the racist theories of eugenics. What’s rarely talked about, however, is that he began his tenure as the head of the police department of Berkeley, Calif., in 1905 by forcing all of his deputies to resign — arguably a kind of early experiment in abolishing the police. He eventually replaced them with college-educated people, hoping they would usher in a new, progressive era in policing.

In Mr. Vollmer’s ideal world, cops would never have to bust heads; instead, they would use their smarts to bring about social reforms that prevented people from becoming “crooks” in the first place. “You prevent people from doing wrong,” a protégé recalled Mr. Vollmer saying in a speech to a group of officers. “That’s the mission of a policeman. I’ll admire you more if in the first year you don’t make a single arrest.”

A 1916 article that Mr. Vollmer co-wrote disparaged traditional police departments as corrupt, inept and violent, with officers chosen for their “political pull and brute strength.” His solution, which became a reality at the University of California, Berkeley, was “a school for the special training of police officers,” which would grant the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in criminology.

It sounds like an uncontroversial suggestion. But Mr. Vollmer’s police school was actually part of a radical plan to dissolve the Berkeley Police Department and rebuild it as a better organization.

Today, as governments and citizens contemplate the future of local law enforcement, it’s worth remembering that reshaping American policing is not some shocking new idea from the radical left. Though Mr. Vollmer’s reforms were not a direct analogue of today’s abolish-the-police movement, he, too, argued that police departments didn’t do enough to serve their immediate communities.

Mr. Vollmer realized that policing was broken, and he believed that college education was the best way to fix it. He envisioned future police officers as educated professionals similar to doctors or lawyers — crime-solving specialists whose jobs involved “coordination of the resources of the community in a concentrated effort toward crime prevention,” as he wrote in his influential 1936 textbook, “The Police and Modern Society.” Educated police officers, he believed, would understand that they could not work alone, that they would need to coordinate efforts with other agencies and the community.

Meanwhile, Mr. Vollmer systemized the practices of policing and built in accountability. He mandated that his officers create written records of their work (the first that the city ever kept) to measure their progress in reducing crime. He popularized the idea of crime labs, where officers could study evidence using science — an idea that rapidly spread to other departments, along with his record-keeping methods. And his department partnered with social organizations for at-risk youth, such as the scouts and Boys’ Clubs.

Despite his utopian aspirations, Mr. Vollmer’s legacy is mixed at best. He militarized the police — a move that has echoes in today’s use of military weaponry by police forces, and he included eugenics in his proposed university curriculum.

Still, his fundamental insight — that police departments need to be radically rebuilt — keeps returning to public consciousness, haunting us until we do something about it. Mr. Vollmer was hugely influential in American policing, but some of his most forward-thinking suggestions remain aspirational, while his darker ideas planted the seeds for policing methods, such as racial profiling, that still plague us.

It’s striking that some of today’s advocates for abolishing or defunding the police echo Mr. Vollmer’s views. Mariame Kaba, an anti-criminalization activist and grass-roots organizer, recently argued that one way to abolish the police would be to “redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs.” She proposed that “trained ‘community care workers’ could do mental-health checks if someone needs help.”

Mr. Vollmer’s 1936 textbook makes a similar suggestion, though more as an approach to reducing crime than Ms. Kaba’s goal of creating a cooperative society in which police are obsolete. Mr. Vollmer asserted that school, welfare, health, and recreation were more likely to prevent crime than jails. “In a movement which aims at the reduction of crime,” he wrote, “there simply is no place for slums, malnutrition, physical want or disease.” He added that victimless crimes like drug use and sex work should be handled by nonpolice agencies, just as mental health crises should be.

And like today’s advocates for criminal justice reform, Mr. Vollmer wanted police officers to be accountable, hence his emphasis on keeping careful records of all arrests and investigations. Almost single-handedly, he ushered in the age of data analysis in police work. There is a direct line between his strategies in the 1920s and the use of body cams today.

There is also a direct line between his work and racial profiling. Like many white men of his day, Mr. Vollmer was infatuated with scientific racism, or the constellation of ideas that suggest there is a biological basis for racial hierarchies. In a section of his proposed police training curriculum, he listed “eugenics,” “the origin of races” and “race degeneration” as part of a section on “criminological anthropology and heredity.” Despite hiring Berkeley’s first Black police officer — the renowned Walter Gordon, who later was the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands — Mr. Vollmer suggested in some of his writings that Black people were predisposed to crime. Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America” explores how the violent injustices of Jim Crow policing were bolstered by ideas like the ones Mr. Vollmer promoted.

A veteran of the Philippine-American War, Mr. Vollmer based the Berkeley Police Department’s centralized command structure on what he had experienced in the military. And in 1906 he established mobile bicycle patrols (yes, he was an early champion of bicycle cops, too), based on tactics he learned while crushing resistance fighters outside Manila.

In the last century, Mr. Vollmer’s emphasis on mandating education and a professionalized police force has largely fallen by the wayside. While some police departments set minimum college education levels for their officers, many don’t, despite research indicating that officers who have graduated from college are almost 40 percent less likely to use any form of force. His notion of a liberal college education for police was supplanted by models that are closer to technical training programs, according to the criminal justice professor Lawrence W. Sherman. “Instead of serving as a resource for changing the role of the police,” Mr. Sherman wrote in the late 1970s, “college programs for police officers have been subverted to help maintain the status quo in policing.”

While some of this shift had to do with the growing conservatism of police departments, it was also rooted in a theory of community policing. Critics pointed out that working-class people couldn’t always afford to attend universities. If police departments wanted to hire officers who could patrol their own low-income neighborhoods, the argument went, it was elitist to demand four-year degrees.

To this point, Mr. Vollmer would perhaps respond that reforming the police doesn’t come cheap — and that public funds could be used to educate would-be officers. When he forced out his deputies, he rebuilt the department with extra money from the city for education, raises and lab equipment. The proposals of Ms. Kaba and other police abolitionists would put public funds toward educating a wide range of people in community support jobs: mental health experts, conflict de-escalation teams, addiction specialists and advocates who can help the unhoused find shelter.

American police departments reflect our nation’s darkest impulses toward organized violence and punishment, but they also reflect the aspirations of a society that believes in community service and protecting the innocent. As we chart a new course for law enforcement, it’s time that we revisit the lost history of police education — and make it part of our future too.