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What a damning article on the whole process of design construction and permitting in this region of the country. The only thing I would say, from my experience, is that I don’t think things have changed all that much. It’s not unusual to see Cities, counties, and the State get intimidated into...

This is a very disturbing article and makes you wonder if we will ever get definitive answers as to why the building collapsed. Hopefully this legal pressure from Surfside will result in Kilsheimer gaining access to the site and debris, but the truth is he should have been on site throughout...

In my experience this problem starts with the original plans, which were sloppy and never should have been approved for construction. This tells me there was insufficient oversight from the local building department. This is a major problem in Florida at both state and local levels and is a...

Interesting observations in this article but again so called structural engineers making statements that are incorrect. Specifically, the statement, which has been repeated numerous times, that if there was something incorrect in the original design then it would have shown up soon after...

Agreed that it seems very unlikely that the AC units were at all involved in initiating the collapse, but there is some confusion when people talk about the “roof first” theory. The AC units aren’t the only thing that could have fallen off of the roof. The original plans show the roof parapet to...

This is a good question to ask from the laypersons perspective so I will try and answer it based on my experience in design analysis and inspection of reinf conc structures for almost 30 years. The problem with a scenario where there is no trigger as you describe where the plaza deck has...

I couldn't agree more. Reinforcement that is corroding inside of a concrete slab or beam results in heavy staining, cracking, and spalling of the concrete due to expansion of the rusted rebar. This is incredibly common in Florida and especially with coastal bridges and buildings and is...

You make several good points. We engineers who do this type of work regularly see deteiorated reinforced concrete members that look a lot worse than what we can see in the 2018 report and in the video of the parking garage taken by a prospective buyer a year or two ago. The beam you are...

Well this seems like a very reasonable comment to make, but the truth is that there was nothing in the 2018 report that would indicate that the building was “terminally weakened” and going to collapse 3 years later. None of the issues that were noted were anywhere near the level of deterioration...

One curious thing about this collapse is that there is the North building which has some identical features, one of which is the column layout in the critical collapse area. A lot of us have looked at the tic toc video to try and understand better the collapse of the pool deck and supporting...

The original plans are, as you noted, terrible. Full of discrepancies and missing and inconsistent information. To clarify, I think the depth you are seeing refers to pile cap thickness, not depth of pile. The depth or length of piles (either 150 ton PIF or the original 50 ton PC) should have...

The 4 ft tall parapet is comprised of reinforced concrete columns at 20 o.c. with a reinforced concrete cap beam and CMU wall filling in between the columns. Maybe there are some other notes or details in the plans but this only states that the column is tied to the slab with 4 -#5 bars.

I appreciate your post. We are trying to walk a fine line between being skeptical of new theories but also open minded if the evidence points in a new direction. I think we are at that point with what, to my eyes, shows the pool deck area column basically destroyed prior to the main collapse...

It seems like a very realistic scenario for the collapse and one that has been well simulated in videos is that the pool deck slab failed in punching shear first and imparted a large lateral load to one of the main supporting columns (column M) of the building or if it didn't put a large lateral...

this is the detail in the Morabito rehab plans that shows strengthening of the slab to resist punching shear. These are preliminary plans so they don't say where they intended to use this but it looks like they didn't think some of the 9-1/2" slabs were adequate to resist the design loads for...

One thing you can see looking through the original plans is that the designer changed the foundation design from closely spaced precast concrete piles (PC) with a capacity of 50 tons each to a pressure injected footing (PIF) with a theoretical capacity of 150 tons each. This was clearly done to...

I can understand that KCE wouldn't want to speculate at this point in the investigation but its not quite right to say that its too early to form a hypothesis. We have the original plans which are LOADED with red flags that strongly suggest the original design was flawed. A serious...

One thing that we know pretty well from eyewitnesses and video next door is that the slab between the pool and the building failed first. This is also corroborated by the site photos of the damage (see below). An excellent video of the probable collapse sequence is on youtube Link. The photo...

As we go forward, it will be critical to look at ways to improve the design, construction, maintenance, and rehab process to try and prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future. This is where my interest in this lies as I do structural design projects (bridges and buildings) in South...