Champlain Towers Collapse 1

[CardsFan1]

I realize that this issue has been discussed at length and there are many threads on the subject. I skimmed some of the threads but did not read all of them.
Has there been a discussion of what is the liability of the SE is in the case?

“We had no idea the building was in imminent danger,” Max Friedman, a former board member who is not a party in the litigation filed so far, told The Post. “Why didn’t he tell us the building was going to fall down?”

 

[JStephen]

Everyone involved that has any money or any insurance will get the bejeebers sued out of them, is how that works.
Beyond that- it's difficult to say what they should have known, based on information they had.
Hindsight is 20/20 so we've got a couple of thousand posts pointing out in detail every little flaw in the building.
On the other hand, if someone had posted a week before the collapse and said "Here's this building I'm evaluating, what do you think?", I rather doubt they would have gotten a chorus of "Evacuate immediately!"

 

[3DDave]

The problem for such things is this - the building had been standing for a long time, so was there an observable change that suggested differently and, since it's still standing at the time of that observation, how can it's continuing to stand be explained? In contrast the FIU bridge, at emplacement, was suffering extreme failures before additional loads were applied - one could easily have concluded that increasing loads would cause it to fail completely and it did, but no scheduled or expected increase in external loading appears to have happened to the building.

The best time to have caught the building failure was when the plans were altered and the columns weren't.

My general feeling is that most failures are due to failure of imagination rather than failure of ability and I don't know how to find guilt for that.

That terrible things happen that seem so clear afterwards are mostly because it didn't occur to anyone to check or account for. Two building examples, the first where someone did imagine it, but not the ones who designed it, was the Citigroup Center building where a college student used her imagination and wondered how a load case was accounted for. Spoiler: it had not been. Once identified, a corrective response was rapidly made.

The second, one of the first glass towers. The designers accounted for the extra sunshine by laminating dark light-filtering plastic to the glass, setting up a large thermal gradient with, and tension field in, the surrounding glass perimeter. No one imagined a fractured sheet of glass silently plunging several floors to embed itself into the brains of a mother walking with her three year old child. They didn't imagine it at the design stage, they didn't imagine it when multiple panes had broken, they didn't imagine it when the building owners hid the fractures by putting plywood up to so the office workers were no longer distracted, workers who could then not see the cracks expanding across the pane, and they didn't imagine it when the building owners delayed replacing that fractured pane because some paint work scaffolding made it inconvenient to reach.