The whole point is lost if you keep it a secret
So…they don’t look at the engineering reports until after the building has collapsed?
A structural engineering report provided to the Champlain Towers condominium association in 2018 found widespread issues that required extensive repairs “in the near future.”
That’s the one that just pancaked.
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told NPR’s Weekend Edition that the engineer report was likely not read until years later. “I’m under the impression that it is something that nobody had seen until yesterday when we started looking back into the records to try to understand if there was anything in the record that would indicate why this building fell down,” he said.
What??
I could be wrong but I thought the whole point of such reports was to see if there is anything wrong, i.e. anything that needs fixing. I didn’t think the point was just to see if there is anything wrong and if there is ignore it.
The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret, why didn’t you tell the world eh?
That reminds me of the water quality work I used to do. We would do several years of sampling, get lab analyses, and write up comprehensive reports, including recommendations for action. Which, of course, costs money. My boss told me most of the reports were just filed on the bookshelf; no one actually read them or implemented changes. It was almost like we were doing performance art.
THE WHOLE POINT IS LOST IF YOU KEEP IT A SECRET.
Seriously everybody watch & listen to Dr Strangelove say it. Whiz ahead to the last 30 seconds or so if you don’t want to watch the whole clip. It was ringing in my head the whole time as I read the NPR piece.
We have weld test plate reports that are also write & only documents… Difference is that while the reports rot in a drawer I do actually do decision making based on what the test plate tells me.
It wasn’t kept secret.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/miami-building-collapse-investigation.html
But the management association doesn’t seem to have taken the necessary urgency from the report.
Fast. Quality. Cheap. As in many other things, you can only ever have two of the above in construction. Most apartment buildings are run on fairly tight budgets. My pick is that the delay of what 2.5 +/- years was to allow the owners association to grapple with the consequences of the report, seek advice, secure funding, have remedial work designed, appoint a contractor and subcontractors, carry out the actual logistical planning and then potentially wait for the time slot of best availability to come into line.
A delay of 2 years would not be unusual at all in my experience, and if there was no real sense of urgency (or the urgency had not been adequately communicated or understood), a longer delay again, potentially stretching into decades can easily occur.
Almost certainly they could have had everything underway within a year by throwing money at the issue. And if they threw enough money at the right designers and contractors they would probably get a quality result as well. The cost could easily have come in very very significantly greater than the $12M budget though.
It’s an absolute tragedy. Probably not the last we’ll hear about given what I understand about reinforced concrete building design from the 1980’s and ’90’s. A feature of designs from that era is that when they fail, they pancake. beams/slabs were strong, columns were weak. There was little reinforcing generally used in that era and not enough attention paid to concrete rot and consequential corrosion of the steel inside.
‘It’s that damn’ testing!’ If you refrain from looking at the ‘cracks and breaks’ there’s no problem.
They explained the engineering of it a bit on CNN the other night – it’s like the late World Trade Center and thousands of other buildings like it: the “spine” is the elevators and stairs which wrap around a core, and if the core fails, the building pancakes. It doesn’t always require a loaded jet flying into it.