Tragedy in Florida: A condo building collapsed in the middle of the night.
Lesson summary
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Sometimes current events are not always pleasant ones, and that’s the case today. The biggest news in the U.S. lately has been the collapse of a condominium building in the town of Surfside, Florida, which is just north of the city of Miami Beach. A twelve-story building just a few blocks away from the ocean collapsed unexpectedly. That’s our main topic today; we’ll also review the English phrasal verb “act on.” I have plenty of examples for you as always. And we have a quote of the week. Let’s get going.
Condo collapse in Florida
A forty-year-old high-rise apartment building near Miami, Florida, collapsed in the middle of the night on June 24, 2021. The whole thing took only twelve seconds and was caught on surveillance video.
This scene was as tragic as it was stunning. A building like this, fully occupied, has never collapsed without warning in U.S. history. It was a calamity that people didn’t even know was possible; there was no earthquake, no storm, no reason to think a building full of sleeping families could suddenly fall down.
As of the time I’m recording this, 95 people are confirmed dead, with another 14 more unaccounted for or still missing. When authorities say people are “unaccounted for,” it means that they have not been seen alive, but their bodies have not been found or identified. Two weeks after the collapse, the rescue effort turned to a recovery effort: hope dwindled quickly that any more survivors would be found. A small number of survivors were rescued in the hours after the initial collapse, but nobody was found alive after that. Several of the victims were found in their beds.
The Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, was an L-shaped condominium building. The part that collapsed was the long section of the “L.” The short section of the building remained standing. Photos showed the building sheared open, with individual apartments exposed and the furniture as well as personal effects of the owners visible from the outside. A child’s bed could be seen teetering on the edge. Just over a week after the north side fell, the south side was demolished so that rescuers could continue their work more thoroughly and without worrying about the remaining section falling on of them.
How could this have happened? The building was one of many with this style of architecture, in this area and built at about the same time.
It was constructed with reinforced concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world. Concrete by itself is not able to withstand wind, earthquakes, and other pressures that impact a large building. But adding steel rods makes concrete much more stable. Engineers who design the structural parts of buildings determine exactly how much steel is necessary given the design of the building. Local building codes exist to make sure structures are sound and meet these regulations.
But now, some engineers studying the collapse in person and via photographs, suspect that critical parts of the concrete may not have had enough steel reinforcement. Specifically, they point to where the concrete slab of the garage floor connected to the columns that supported the building. The original design of the building called for eight steel reinforcing rods to pass through the connection, four in one direction, and four more perpendicular. But photos from the collapse show far fewer steel reinforcement rods than the original design specified. Photo evidence suggests that the columns supporting the building had detached from the horizontal concrete slabs near the foundation.
There’s more. In late 2018, a local engineering firm performed an analysis of the building. They found that the concrete pillars supporting the building had “abundant cracking.” The steel bars reinforcing the concrete were exposed and deteriorating, meaning they had aged because of the elements like weather conditions. Waterproofing underneath the swimming pool was insufficient. The report poor waterproofing caused the concrete near the pool deck to weaken. The report described it as “major structural damage.”
Based on what’s now known, it appears that a combination of factors caused the building’s structure to weaken. But it’s still not known what triggered the collapse. The investigation will likely take months and a definitive source of the tragedy may never be discovered.
The building was a condominium, a form of ownership that is most common in the United States. In a condominium, residents have full ownership of their individual apartment units and they own a percentage of the common areas or elements. The common elements include things like the lobby, parking lot, swimming pool, roof, basement, and exterior walls—anything that’s not the inside of an individual unit. The owners then elect fellow owners to serve on a volunteer board of directors to manage the affairs of the entire building. The “condo board,” as it’s called, is responsible for performing maintenance on the common elements.
The problem is that condo boards are comprised of ordinary owners. They often hire property managers and consultants to advise them, but volunteer non-professionals are sometimes responsible for making crucial decisions about a building. And condo boards are famous for heated interpersonal disputes, petty squabbling, and ineffective decision-making. Because they’re not expert property managers, these volunteer boards are not always equipped to make important decisions.
That appears to have been the case at Champlain Towers. Meeting minutes show infighting, difficulty making decisions, and one mass resignation of board members. Nobody acted on the 2018 engineering report received by the board. The board knew the situation was getting worse, but they didn’t appear to know how serious, how urgent, or how dangerous the damage really was. In fairness to the board, a tragedy like this has never happened in the U.S.; even weakened concrete would not be considered an imminent threat of collapse. The board president had urged the building to approve the necessary repairs. They did approve some significant structural repairs earlier this year, but by then it was too late. The work was scheduled to begin just weeks after the collapse.
Flaws in the condo model
I am the president of a condominium board and I can tell you the system has its flaws. Individual ownership of apartment units has many benefits. But the structure of condo boards is a serious drawback. Very, very serious decisions are made by people who have no training whatsoever. And sometimes, important decisions are made based on personal vendettas, grudges, resentment, or politics. Individual owners must cover the maintenance and repair of the common elements. If they don’t do enough of that preventative maintenance every year, then the problems multiply and the owners eventually face a huge repair bill. And there’s no external pot of money; all the repairs have to be funded by the owners, according to the percent they own. If there isn’t enough in the building’s collective bank account, then they have to borrow the money and pay it back every month.
That appears to have been the situation in Surfside. The ongoing maintenance and inspection, which should have been happening every year, was delayed for so long that the potential fix was overwhelming. Condo boards can get paralyzed in the face of big decisions like this. They’re not used to spending large amounts of money. It’s also very personal to everyone involved so it’s hard to build a consensus for big investments, everyone has an opinion, everyone has a different personal financial situation, and the people leading the charge aren’t professionals. It’ll be interesting to see, as the investigation progresses, how much the dysfunctional group decision-making contributed to this tragedy.
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