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Building Collapse in Miami
How does this happen in the United States of America?
A 12-story oceanfront condo tower partially collapsed early Thursday morning in the town of Surfside, spurring a massive search-and-rescue effort with dozens of rescue crews from across Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
Reinforced concrete should not fail this way. Clearly, something was not done right, either when it was built, or to maintain it.
I fear there is more of this in our future, as the left continues is march through everything as it destroys all standards.
Prayers for these people and their families.
Published in General
I regret I can only like it once. Also I intend to shamelessly steal this line.
“Safetyism”? A building fell down. Buildings don’t fall down (outside of earthquakes). We expect this is places like China, not America.
In every case of non-disaster related infrastructure failure I now of, someone, at some time, did not do his or her job correctly, and the structure failed. When the balconies collapsed in the hotel, it was because they were not built correctly. People were a fault. Even in Katrina, the flooding was caused because a barge broke free and rammed a wall, letting water through. A better built system coupled with a barge that did not get free would have saved lives. People died because the Army Corp of Engineers did not do a good enough job.
Now, a sink hole would be a form of natural disaster. So are Earthquakes. And, we now build to resist earthquakes. If an area is prone to sinkholes that can collapse a building, it is not unreasonable to expect that the people who sign off on safety make sure that buildings won’t collapse into sink holes.
The bottom line, though, is that building collapses outside of natural disasters (and we have no evidence of this at the time) are the fault of human beings. It is perfectly reasonable to look at a building collapsing and say “someone messed up”, as much as it is reasonable to say that when we see a car skid off the road it was diver error. Yes, the driver might have had a stroke. That is unlikely.
The pilings under this building must have been totally undermined for a sinkhole to have caused this. When they built it presumably the pilings were driven into the ground and the ground must have appeared normal when they did this. The purpose is to further harden and compact the soil under the foundation. If a natural sinkhole could undermine high rise construction pilings like that, that’s really troubling.
Long term subsidence:
https://www.flseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/Increasing-flood-haz._MB-case-study-2016.pdf
https://faculty.fiu.edu/~swdowins/publications/Fiaschi-Wdowinski-OCM-2020.pdf
Piece of cake. Chiseled in stone.
Just to be super clear, people need to Google that term. I wish the Republicans would use it frequently. If we only had public goods produced by the government, and the stupid Federal Reserve stopped pushing the economy around, everybody would be better off and conservatism and libertarianism would actually work and sell.
I am not sure what subsidence means? Is this land being washed away?
If HR1/SB1 had passed, would they even NEED campaigns?
I suppose they would still go around hoovering up money, but they wouldn’t need to spend it campaigning.
According to this article, Wdowinski immediatly thought of this building when he heard about a collapse:
Best said by G’Kar for sure!
Back in May, one of the tie girders on the I-40 Hernando de Soto Bridge was found to have cracked. Total failure of the bridge could have happened at any time. A subsequent review of drone footage from an inspection in 2019 – an inspection of the inspection – revealed that there were signs of damage to the area back then too. Be that as it may, assigning blame to the failure of the girder is kind of pointless. The bridge has been there for 49 years. It could have been a fault in the original metal. It could have been a fault in the welding done creating the girder. It could have been caused somehow by the seismic retrofit of the bridge, which started in 2000 and is ongoing. It could have been caused by normal wear and tear.
Things fail.
Yes they do. And all of those things are the part of a human failure. Stating that is not assigning blame.
I’ve heard that for homeowners – and possibly businesses too – at least in some areas of Florida, insurance is required to include coverage for sinkholes. Not that the insurance will prevent sinkholes, but they are apparently common enough that it’s considered wrong – perhaps illegal – to not be insured for the damages/losses that might result.
My rather vague recollection from when I lived in Florida is that sinkholes are an issue that no-one really has an incentive to address properly.
Much of Florida is basically sand on top of Swiss cheese, and there are probably a very large number of existing buildings built on top of potential sinkholes. While it would be possible to conduct a really thorough geological survey to find which areas are in danger of disappearing into a hole, there is a strong incentive NOT to find out. If you discover that an existing house is built on top of a sinkhole, it would immediately become basically worthless, so there are potentially huge financial losses which someone is going to have to bear.
Since the chances of any particular building falling into a sinkhole are relatively small – even though the consequences are catastrophic – it seems to be accepted that the occasional disaster is better than a huge financial upheaval which would probably make a lot of lawyers very rich and saddle some property owners / mortgage lenders / builders etc with massive, and rather random losses.
If this dreadful event in Miami turns out to be due to a sinkhole, it may bring about a big change, but it won’t be pretty to watch. I don’t think there is any very satisfactory answer, other than perhaps the biblical warning not to build a house on sand.
That’s one possibility.
Drawdown of the water table can lead to subsidence above it (don’t know where the underground aquifers are in that part of FL.). Water or sewage leaks.The sea level is rising some. A marine environment can be hard on concrete, especially if seawater is in prolonged contact higher up on the foundation structures than was planned for when specifying the foundation details.
Thank you
Mayor Bowser announced that the walkway had been damaged by a truck driven by Donald Trump.
I read that a vehicle had crashed into the supports for the pedestrian bridge, weakening it and contributing to the collapse.
Here’s a quote from the Fiaschi paper you linked. Emphasis added:
In other words, if you build on fill, it can compact under your buildings, and if you extract groundwater, the depleted aquifer may prove more compressible than it was before you used it to provide water to your rapidly increasing population.
My sister lost almost all her possessions when her apartment building collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake. It was built on fill and the soil liquefied during the quake. The Scrabble words are thixotropy or thixotropic. I keep hoping that a newly discovered earthquake fault (it happens fairly often, even in well-studied California) gets named It’s Not My.
I read that a truck on the road beneath it had run into the support beams causing the collapse.
It was a bridge repair project which involved driving new pilings. A piling was driven through a long disused tunnel under the river. The breach caused flooding of basements throughout the Loop. There were no watertight doors in the tunnel network.
Or, who knows. Does Thomas Friedman get secret info which he lets out in apparent hyperbole but which those in the know can decode? Was Hugo Chavez right about something?
Thanks! I vaguely remembered some of the video from that. It was pretty dramatic from what I recall a whirlpool in the canal.
I agree completely. I also think that for normal goods i.e. health care and education the government should be strictly limited to provisioning and restricted from providing.
Amsterdam is kind of a unique place essentially it is all on reclaimed land. If I recall correctly the cement block meant to house the metro sprang a leak which caused water and sand to fill in the sand was leached from between the pylons, centuries old btw, of near by foundations this allowed the pylons to move. Which dramatically weakened the foundations of nearby buildings. To the point I think some had to be abandoned. It is a reminder that some systems are remarkably fragile. And to my mind a warning that humans often fail to appreciate this until it is too late.
I am reminded of the Hyatt Regency Kansas City in 1981. I suspect the investigation of this one will turn up some interesting failures. But, please do remember, when the finger of blame points to the responsible contractor and it turns out that said contractor had been honored six years running for having the most diverse supplier base, all must be forgiven.
Man, it is hard being this cynical…
Sinkholes?
Forgive me as I am sure that they are still pulling out dead bodies, but I immediately thought of how Congressman Hank Johnson once feared that the island of Guam would tip over if too many military people were stationed there.
Just recently I was watching a video of a British person doing a reaction video to the date that certain American cities were founded. He stopped the video and decided to look up the founding date of a few different cities. The youngest American city he very quickly and randomly found was Miami which was incorporated in 1896 with 444 citizens. Then it grew…
1920 29,571
1930 110,637
1940 172,172
1950 249,276
2019 467,963
Miami Beach was founded later in 1915. Although Florida has the oldest American city with 1565 St. Augustine outside of places like Puerto Rico, Florida is such a young state. Cape Coral is the 9th largest city in Florida, and it was founded in 1970. When Kennedy ran against Nixon in 1960, Florida had the same number of electoral votes as Iowa, Kentucky, or Louisiana. In 1900, it had the same number of electoral votes as Vermont.
Of course, a lot of Florida’s amazing growth is due to the fact that it doesn’t have a state income tax. If Hawaii and Florida switched income tax rates, I think Hawaii would have a lot more electoral votes and people would be trying to build land into the Pacific Ocean to build more stuff.
I remember Michael Caine saying that he moved to Miami years ago as he noticed on the winter weather maps that there was always this one red spot that never got cold. “What that place called?” “That’s Miami.” “That’s where I want to live.”
I was trying to look up some place the other day near Miami. What is that place? Three towers of apartments or condos on the beach. Oh, that’s the Trump Towers Sunny Isles Condos…
Florida has been lucky that it hasn’t elected a Democrat for governor since 1994. All it would take is for a few Democrats to get elected and a few hurricanes to hit, and Florida could suddenly start going downhill fast. The Democrats should rename themselves the Hurricane Party, but I think hurricanes cause much less destruction in the long term than Democrats.