Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 09 139

[SFCharlie]

A continuation of our discussion of this failure. Best to read the other threads first to avoid rehashing things already discussed.
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 02
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 03
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 04
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 05
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 06
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 07
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 08

SF Charlie
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[gonefishing2]

Spartan5, If those Hammer Drills damage what little negative moment rebar is available over columns and developed say only a short distance into slab, that is a much bigger problem than you want to admit....

I would appreciate you offering up your theory on MaudSTL's Database. I think it is a lot more constructive for us to cite our theories than throwing darts at each other....... I can easily see more rolls of tar paper than your count, but perhaps not as many as others.... It really does NOT MATTER....

 

[Optical98]

Spartan5
"Don’t you remember the tar paper rolls being identified in the TikTok video of the garage collapse?"

Um no, I was still trying to conceptualize the planter box falling thru rebar and landing perfectly intact...
honestly I thought it looked like a washing machine

 

[AusG]

The rolls are arranged in staggered rows to achieve efficient packing, so 5 rows of 5,4,5,4,5 making 23 all together. There may be a few loose ones under the green tarp. If this is anything to do with the collapse of an ostensibly professionally designed and constructed RC building in a first world country I'll be....surprised

 

[Demented]

@Thermopile
That game is fitting for what ever the cause is. This building was just bandaids holding hands. An unfortunate chain of catastrophic events over 10 minutes could have easily undone the "beautification" work all over the building. I'm still more inclined to believe heavy rains added too much of a load onto the crumbling deck that was holding water, as well as a clogged retrofit French drain in a planter that had it's original drain holes filled in under some permitted work. But I've seen too much evidence of wankery on this building due to poor management by a cheap-ass condo board and a crappy workforce, that to me indicates that this building, although built in the US of A, was slowly transformed into the sort of third world country building that we would not be surprised to see collapse due someone having slammed their front door a little too hard. Too much gravity in one spot.

I'm pretty sure after all that's been seen, no one is surprised this building did collapse. It's like a game of Jenga that 34765460384560286534 different engineers and contractors decided to jump into, but along the way they kept modifying all the pieces with no concern to what any other party has done in the past, or was going to do after. Check the original plans and work off that. All will be good. Surfside's record keeping doesn't seem to be the best in the world either which I doubt made accurate engineering to the structure all the more difficult.

Either way, I am interested in knowing if the collapse could originate in that path. I see no harm in combining everyone's theories into one event. How else would we fill up the 10 or so minutes of collapse?


I'm sure the NIST lasered every inch of that pile and marked out what was on top of what. Oh the years of waiting.

 

[Eufalconimorph]

26 Jul 21 02:30
Well maybe the AI software that someone used before could fill that pallet out? Give you a more accurate count?

You mean less accurate.

The moment I use the AI software, it ceases to be a photograph and becomes a digital painting. A *very convincing* digital painting, but still not a photograph of what was actually present.

The same thing is true of *any* interpolating enlargement. If this were a court, it'd be evidence tampering. That's my whole point with showing it: you can enlarge images, but it doesn't get you any new data.

 

[zebraso]

the surveillance video showing the collapse of Champlain Tower South that has much higher resolution than all other videos

On the Today Show video I cannot find any hint of a parapet. You would think if it was there the clearer video might at least show a hint of it.

 

[Optical98]

Eufalconimorph,
Ok, I thought if you just gave it one roll as the model and told it to multiply by x & y margins it might work.

 

[Demented]

Moot point, but the green crane hoist bag with yellow handles on the roofing rolls is not a tarp. FYI

 

[Optical98]

Demented,

I'm enjoying the many theories and such retorts as "cockamamie idea that rolling tar paper burst through the parapet wall!"... have me rolling.

I am on "Team Trigger" tho, I can't (don't want) to believe a building like that can just vaporize one night.
That's a terrifying concept with so many condos within those same margins all along that coast and others.

 

[Demented]

Oh it has me scared too.
I'm not looking forward to going to work tomorrow. I have to continue fabrication on some Bahama shutters being retrofit to some columns on a PH suite somewhere on the ocean. I have my doubts that any engineering on windload was done, let alone on if the placement of the 2-3/4"x1/4" 308L (this rusts on the ocean. I don't know why we use it) tapcons. The fabrication matches nothing with the drawing thanks to a foreman who does everything in his power to save the boss a dime on labor to account for his shortcomings in ordering the incorrect, but more expensive material or not knowing the difference between 3 and 4. So not like engineering would have even mattered since this thing is now more than double it's original weight and the weldment areas have gone from .093 to .125 open corner and fillet welds to .093 to .375 fillet and .25 to .375 double v. 2024 to 6061 with 4043 DC MIG being heat-washed over with AC GTAW for some reason. There is no hero award for trying to always be the nice guy.
I either do what I'm told because I like having a roof over my head and food in my belly, or I walk away and hope I can land another job that day. Even reporting to the Miami OSHA field office is a joke. In the 10 years I've been reporting issues because I take Safety serious, I've never seen anything more than a slap on the wrist, even for serious and potentially fatal if not rectified issues. You know they call the employer and give them a heads up before the show up right?

Precision guess work based on information provided by those of questionable knowledge

^This tag line isn't because of engineers. Before Covid, my fabrication and maths was under the scrutiny of 3 and 4 letter agencies constantly. I've seen some stuff recently that's haunting. They joke about how it's not going to space, but when you fire back "this is why building's collapse", it falls on deaf ears. Ignorance truly is bliss. The men that build the stuff where we sleep often don't care, because that's not where they sleep, and it's almost quittin' time. Is it Friday yet?

 

[gonefishing2]

One last thought for evening. If the concrete is as bad as it appears, I can easily see hammer drilling to cause break up in places of concrete, causing the need for larger repairs before mounting OSHA tie offs. Now could be the workers just throw in some extra epoxy and called it good, since anchor plate would hide the problem.....

I think folks need real hands on field experience to fully understand what actually goes on.... It gets me started on how I have no respect for someone that has not come up thru the ranks the hard way, because I know they can not grasp everything, without having that experience. It is like the company bringing in a English or History Major as CEO of an Engineering and Construction Company.. Sorry this hound does not hunt!! You can not manage stuff you don't under stand..... IMO. The more diverse hands on and book knowledge and skills you have, the more capable you are..... I know PhD's that I would NOT let touch an electrical panel for example. They may blow me away on book smarts, but they are at a loss in the real world at times....

 

[zebraso]

You can not manage stuff you don't under stand..... IMO

You are echoing the father of the nuclear Navy, one Hyman Rickover. One story is that he turned down an applicant because he put salt on his food before tasting it during the interview.

Edit for spelling the Admirals name wrong. Oops!

Also:
“Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you learn nothing. Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.”
― Hyman G. Rickover

 

[SFCharlie]

Ok now on this pic, zoom in to the right of the blue tent as far as you can

OK, Yes, there is a crushed car. Now what?


SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[Optical98]

SF Charlie,

We were noting the various crushed cars being pulled out of the site with cranes, they swing them way over to the back to be hauled away, but I was wondering why there was this one car sitting alone in the pool. Demented said some would catch on fire when being pulled out, so the crane would just put them in the pool. I suppose it had water in it at the time.

 

[Auri]

I found a copy of the surveillance video showing the collapse of Champlain Tower South that has much higher resolution than all other videos.

Well, I felt most of us already saw the penthouse roof shape in the original Twitter video...

The TODAY video is just a reproduction of the same phone recording that WSVN published, but zoomed in slightly and color adjusted. I think the dead giveaway is that you can still hear the "botanical gardens" music in the news report. Still, I took snapshots of both videos trying my best to match an exact frame, have a look:

They basically made the video look warmer and blew it up a little without adding data. Original source links:

https://www.today.com/video/why-did-florida-condo-collapse-115446853828

https://twitter.com/wsvn/status/140...g-collapses-in-florida-watch-video-young-pan/

 

[Spartan5]

I am on "Team Trigger" tho, I can't (don't want) to believe a building like that can just vaporize one night.
That's a terrifying concept with so many condos within those same margins all along that coast and others.

Triggers? Sure. There’s a chance of that, or of general decay or of non-compliance with the original design. Probably all three. There are the “curious” concrete samples after all. And the unusual punching failures in the ground level slab.

But I’ve not seen a single conclusive or tangible piece of evidence regarding anything being initiated on the roof. Not a one. It’s all been loosely supported conjecture at best. And otherwise imaginations running wild at worst.

I mean… we have talk of 3/4” hammer-drilled holes taking out reinforcement. Or somehow vibrating the entire thousands ton build so that it shook the patio slab loose (many hours later). We could come up with dozens of hypotheticals for why the roof could fail. But to what end? There’s nothing indicating that it did.

Never mind the core samples, where the preliminary failure is known to actually have occurred, that went clean through the rebar in several places.

Tonight, I saw 4 rolls of felt get transformed into 11. It’s just too much sometimes.

 

[Sym P. le]

Youtube - Structural Madness

An excellent engineering review of the structural shortcomings of the pool deck level and building columns.

 

[Seppe]

If anyone from the general public wanted to get a flavor of the structural engineering community's theories and discussion related to the Surfside collapse, God forbid they stumble upon the last couple iterations of this Eng-Tips thread as a source of education and insight.

At the hands of a select and persistent few, the discussion has turned into Grabassery 101, rooted in some of the most biased and inane "photo-analysis" conjurings and subjective babbling one could dream up.

 

[zebraso]

I have to go back a bit to the comment that image enhancement constitutes somethin akin to evidence tampering and would not hold up in court. That is patently untrue. In fact it is a legit forensics technique which has been used to obtain murder convictions that otherwise would not have been obtained without it. I hope that is clear enough. Also the notion that image enhancement creates data that was not there by altering the original is untrue. NASA has pioneered image enhancement for the purpose of scientific research of deep space. They are not reaching false conclusions on that basis. You can even get some of their algorithms in free/trialware and mess around with it. There is also a photoshop plug in for it if I am not mistaken, but you have to pay.

In the case of Sharra Ferger as long ago as 1997, Lucis (Nasa image enhancement) was used to clarify a bite mark photo and clear the wrong suspect after he was convicted and sent to prison. The same enhanced image was then used to identify the correct suspect and along with his DNA to convict him.

 

[Sym P. le]

It would not be a significant loss if these threads were deleted entirely. Nothing has been learned that isn't covered better elsewhere.