‘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.
READ MORE
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.”