Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 13 44

[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
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 09
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 10
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 11
Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 12


SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[SFCharlie]

...placement of beams 33, 34, and 35 on the main slab...

I don't know if this will help?:
(Image doesn't seem to be working for me...)

SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[Jeff Ostroff]

Folks, whether or not a JLG lift or a pallet Jack was used or not used may be irrelevant because still even if you wheeled in a pallet of these bricks that's an extremely heavy amount of weight to be driving across a pool deck that other engineers have already said was 99% loaded from the day it was built. This is the same sort of failure mode that they had at the Sampoong Department Store collapse. rolling a heavy AC across the concrete roof slab.

Also don't think for a minute that any of the deliveries was done under the auspices of an engineer. A lot of these delivery guys are not exactly engineers if you know what I mean. And a lot of these companies you can see them when they drive down the street with the paver bricks on the pallets on the trucks they have a forklift on the back they don't mess around with a pallet Jack because that would mean that they have to be able to get the pallets of pavers off of those giant flatbed trucks you don't do that with a pallet Jack necessarily it takes something at lot stronger like a forklift. And these guys are not going to sit there and park the forklift on the street and hand-carry all of these paver bricks onto the pool deck.

So I still think my hypothesis is the most likely method that these paver bricks were delivered onto the pool deck with a forklift. Heck even when they delivered pavers to my driveway a couple of months ago when we were doing our new paver brick driveway it was a forklift that carried the pavers on the pallets, 3 pallets off of the truck, and set it on my front yard.

These brick paver delivery guys are not engineers and they're not going to stop and pull out the plans to the garage to see if it's OK to drive their forklift on top of the deck there and I'm willing to bet that these delivery guys likely thought they were on the ground not over a garage. Most casual observers of this condo collapse it took me a long time to convince people that the pool deck was over a garage that it was not at ground level. I had to convince numerous people that the pool was not inground.

 

[Jeff Ostroff]

Hi , we have been talking about this mystery column in the middle of that H-Beam since July. Numerous people have commented on my July video asking what that extra column is, and I have been beating my head against the wall trying to figure it out, there is no logical answer. We posted this question here on the forums previously also, and no one ever even acknowledged it. I plan on doing a video on that mystery column this week. IT does not appear on the garage level floor plan, but it does appear on the lobby level floor plan.

 

[Nukeman948]

Unrelated to all of that, I need some help with the placement of beams 33, 34, and 35 on the main slab.

I think the location is pretty close to where it should be. I have a real crazy idea about your question and a certain column but, due to a new development, I think I might wait to post it for a week or so. I got a deal on some pavers but I have to unload them by hand.

Stay safe and make sure to hit that subscribe button Folks. You don't want to miss out on all the cool deals that pay my bills.

 

[Nukeman948]

Folks, whether or not a JLG lift or a pallet Jack was used or not used may be irrelevant

Gosh, you're right. No pallet jack was used. How silly of me.

Stay safe and make sure to hit that subscribe button Folks. You don't want to miss out on all the cool deals that pay my bills.

 

[Demented]

@Nukeman948
A

http://www why

not now? I promise I'll like and subscribe for more 90% off tool deals that can't go on airplanes.

@SFCharlie
Image doesn't work for me either.

I have no nefarious thoughts on it. Just want to make sure the beams are located next to the correct columns and it hasn't been moved around. I'm just confused. Oh well. Back to squinting at blurry pictures of rebar.

 

[AutisticBez]

Jeff, I worked construction in a basement for a building twice the height. We were building car stackers.

Because of the weights we were dealing with shoring was used in the bike storage area below the basement parking, then shoring was used between the basement and a ground level parking area which more stackers were used at.

The issue isn't the forklift on the pool deck. 100% shoring should have been used under it. Obviously the pool deck should have weight on it, it should be built with tolerances. The shoring isn't to stop the structure collapsing, its to prevent damage to the concrete structure.

Also, I have never seen the same prefab join welded so many times in my life. They had this guy redo the weld every day for two weeks. Never ending story.

 

[Nukeman948]

Pallet Jack Nonsense

Now that I have a bit of free time,

Whether or not a JLG lift or a fork lift was used, is totally irrelevant because Engineers can be surprisingly smart and forward thinking at times. When an area has limited load capacity they try to incorporate some type of limit or barrier to access by heavy equipment into their design. This pool deck was designed to have a narrow gate at each end and access through the lobby is blocked by three stairs to prevent access by heavy equipment.
They also made the turns to drive in to the porte cochère tight on purpose to prevent large vehicles from being able to enter.
I'm not convinced that heavy equipment ever got on the pool deck without some Engineer giving approval for these barriers to be circumvented.
And delivery guys don't ever need to do the Engineers job if the Engineer did it right himself.

You need to remove the old pavers before you bring in the new ones and assuming the new ones weigh the same as the old ones you should never exceed the load capacity of the slab.

If I was the contractor ten years ago replacing the pavers here, I would set up a mid sized excavator outside the wall to lift a couple skips over to the work crew. The work crew would use pallet jacks to move skips around or pallets of pavers. Because pallet jacks don't work good on sand, they would move the skips to the far side and fill the skips with the old pavers and work back towards the excavator, As the skips get filled they return them to the excavator so they could be lifted and dumped into a fleet of dump trucks. Work in the opposite direction with the new pavers and keep the pallets close to the leading edge of the work area. Now that the access road has been replaced by a sidewalk, the setup would need to be in the courtyard area.
Pretty simple work flow as long as you can keep the workers from painting themselves into a corner.







Stay safe and make sure to hit that subscribe button Folks. You don't want to miss out on all the cool deals that pay my bills.

 

[SwinnyGG]

When an area has limited load capacity they try to incorporate some type of limit or barrier to access by heavy equipment into their design. This pool deck was designed to have a narrow gate at each end and access through the lobby is blocked by three stairs to prevent access by heavy equipment.
They also made the turns to drive in to the porte cochère tight on purpose to prevent large vehicles from being able to enter.
I'm not convinced that heavy equipment ever got on the pool deck without some Engineer giving approval for these barriers to be circumvented.
And delivery guys don't ever need to do the Engineers job if the Engineer did it right himself.

This is a giant leap, and none of it is correct.

Just because there is a gate between some planters does not mean some engineer in 1978 decided "I must keep forklifts out of this area, so these planters are going to 40" apart".

And even if they did, equipment exists which weighs thousands of lbs, and will fit anywhere you can walk. All-terrain pallet jacks exist, but I have worked with dozens of tile setters/landscapers and have never seen a single one in use. When they do stuff like this, they typically use a skid steer. If the site does not prevent access using a full size skid steer, they will use a walk-behind skid steer which fits through a man door.

Ultimately this is all a waste of time. Conjecture is not going to provide the smoking gun.

assuming the new ones weigh the same as the old ones you should never exceed the load capacity of the slab.

Being under the total load limit for the slab /= being under the localized point load limit for one spot on the slab. It would be very easy to set a couple of pallets of pavers next to each other on a slab not designed for that 4,000 lb point load and create a problem, especially in a retrofit situation where there is very likely zero engineering or structural consideration happening.

Which again is completely meaningless because this is all conjecture. Come back with data.

 

[SwinnyGG]

100% shoring should have been used under it.

This is also a leap. You can't assume competence on the part of anyone.

 

[Nukeman948]

...none of it is correct.

Seems like the conjecture is on your part, as is the burden of proving the Engineers didn't do their job.

The Condominium Association is responsible for hiring all contractors and all contracts contain wording as to limitations and responsibilities of all workers and what equipment can or can not be used and what precautions shall be taken. The original 1979 drawings had three full pages laying out what each contractor was responsible for and what precautions were required and what equipment was to be used. Then there are more pages that are trade specific at the beginning of their respective sections. Often there will be job specification books printed up that go into even more details for larger jobs.
Just because some equipment exists does not mean it will be allowed to be used on any job site.

Your strawman arguments are weak.

Stay safe and make sure to hit that subscribe button Folks. You don't want to miss out on all the cool deals that pay my bills.

 

[Jeff Ostroff]

Another thing about that pool deck folks is there was no other installation of paver bricks I think it was a concrete deck from the get-go there's nothing in the plans that I've seen from 1979 that shows pavers

These pavers were added in 1996, I have the 1996 building permit explaining the work to be done, and drawings, and an explanation of concrete spalling repairs, adding paver bricks, etc.

So the architects and engineers in 1979 could not have imagined that somebody would come along later and add not only the weight of the pavers, but the weight of two inches of sand, which does weigh quite a bit, plus all of the water that soaks up in that sand every time it rains at 8.3 pounds per gallon.
You can’t tell me this is not a stressor on the already overloaded, weakened, derated concrete and cracked pool deck and this is also not conjecture because we know that all of this stuff was put in installed in 1996 when it was not there before.

Also, there are planters that were brought in that were not on the original plans that have to weigh a huge amount and now you fill those planters with dirt and then you fill those planters with water when it rains and that adds a lot.
You filled those planters with 20-foot-tall palm trees and how did those palm trees get there? You don't just drag them across the deck and lift them up and over and put him into the planters, at 200 pounds per foot, these palm trees had to have been installed in 1996 and removed in Dec. 2017 with some type of a lift, or maybe they cut them down.

And forget the idea about narrow gates on either end of the pool because the gate on the end where the parking level meets the pool deck has a double gate so it's a 6-foot wide opening. And the gate on the other side of the pool on the East End towards the ocean is a 3-foot gate but the sections on either side of it are designed to be and able to be removed. In fact, companies do this all of the time to get at pool decks.

 

[Jeff Ostroff]

Remember also that the 2018 Morabito engineering report was very scathing about the quality of the work that was done here in 1996 to repair those cracks in the pool deck so those guys that did that work were complete amateurs and the work was so bad do you really think that they even bothered to put up any kind of shoring poles in the garage, do you think they needed it, if all they were doing is grout injection? Did an engineer do calculations to see if the deck needed shoring up while all this weight was being transported across it?

 

[SFCharlie]

Image doesn't work for me either.

Sorry, I realize I didn't fathom the confusion. You're very gracious! Thanks.


SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[SFCharlie]

RE: "Image doesn't work for me either."
In Chrome, I had to go to the URL bar, to the eyeball on the right, next to the star, right click on eye popped up 3rd party cookie dialog which asked "site not working" clicking that let me turn off 3rd party cookie blocking for this site only.
Now Image works for me.

SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[Demented]

@SFCharlie
It's all good. Something shifted somewhere, just can't see what/where.

@Jeff
There was no shoring, nor I believe even maths on additional weight added. No fork trucks were used though on the deck.

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

 

[SFCharlie]

I also saw this of interest. Waterproofing, paver installation and garage repair in 1996.

Since then, paver(s) has been mentioned about 44 times! I know everyone is bored, waiting for MDPD(NCIS?) to loosen their grip on the evidence, but can we move beyond pavers, or I'm go'nta hafta make a new power pointy thing about pavers, pallet jacks, excavators, egos, nonexistent replacements, stamped concrete... Heck, I might even hafta make a YouTube video about it, I have a whole channel with nothing on it, to fill!


SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[Jeff Ostroff]

@Demented I don't see how you can claim No fork trucks were used though on the deck. There is no evidence to support either case. But then you also have to explain how they carted those 20-foot palm trees onto the pool deck.

Until someone can come up with an accurate enough explanation as to how Doctor Strange donned his robe waved his hands around it made those 20-foot palm trees leaned up and over the planters and into the middle of the planters, we have to assume some type of lift or forklift was used on the pool deck.

 

[SFCharlie]

I could do a whole parody of "NCIS-Miami" what with all the NOOK-yoo-ler Submarine Bases, Navel Air stations, and narco activity, I could fill a whole YouTube (intracostal waterway) channel..

SF Charlie
Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

 

[apper.42]

I gave an estimated surcharge two or three parts ago from waterproofing, sand layer and pavers but it is all forgotten in the mass of futile speculation since. Since no-one appears interested in relevant facts, I will not repeat it here.