Miami Beach, Champlain Towers South apartment building collapse, Part 14 41

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

SF Charlie
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[Optical98]

Demented

The video was from unit 711, but yes we should rethink that area around the shear wall and elevator shaft.

SFCharlie

Were you going to re-transcribe that unicode text post that someone added a few days ago? In trying to read/decipher it I thought it said something about inspecting elevator shaft beams??

 

[MaudSTL]

Here’s an archived version of the Miami Herald’s “‘Lives would have been saved’: Fire alarm didn’t go off before Surfside tower collapse.”

 

[Demented]

I agree on the elevator shaft area needing more of a look at. It has been playing on my mind for a while now, but the elevator movement may have something to do with the banging noises. The CMU wall was torn out on the upper floors near the elevator shaft, we know the top of the shaft twisted, and the collapse happened roughly around the time of the last use of the elevator. Throughout the day, the elevator would have not been in service as much, but these noises seem to coincide somewhat with hours of people coming and going from the building. Holes in the main stairwell wall were noted in inspections years prior, but I'm unsure if anymore information is available on that other than it was reported in an inspection and fixed. Though I don't know enough about elevator loading on structures to know if these is even a possibility of being a contributing factor seeing as the elevator and shaft were, for the most part, intact and not affected by the collapse.

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

 

[MaudSTL]

@Optical98, please review the timeline spreadsheet. Despite what the Miami Herald now says, the banging noises the Nirs heard were first heard at 11 PM, when Chani Nir returned home from babysitting, we do not know what time the noises actually started, and we do not know whether Shamoka Furman could also hear them in the lobby…she has never mentioned it. Shamoka Furman tells the Herald that she smelled something potent after the building fell, not before or after the deck fell.

 

[Optical98]

Demented

There was damage to the interior side of the elevator shaft, there were several witness accounts about it.
Raysa said something about a column coming thru the floor or ceiling right in front of the elevators on her floor, another said something along the lines of the elevator shaft looked as if it had fallen or tilted into the hallway because they couldn't get past it to get to the stairwell.

We have zero photo of that interior area besides to roof top. We do know they were doing roof work on the 10 stack roof... I don't quite understand the entrances n exits of that whole rooftop elevator structure to contemplate how or where roofing equipment might have been stored away for the night up there.

 

[Optical98]

1:14 am

Sara, Gabe and Chani Nir Sara Nir and her children Gabe, 25, and Chani, 15, had just gotten home to their two-bedroom apartment on the first floor. They began to hear noises that sounded like their neighbor was doing construction work. “It’s like one of those things like when you bang on the floor,” Gabe Nir told the Herald. “We thought like people were changing tiles or doing some flooring or possibly banging on the walls, people hammering something.” “The funny thing is we just got home maybe 25 minutes before this happened and we didn’t notice anything at all. We drove in the garage. ... I went and parked the car in reverse. I went upstairs. I didn’t notice anything at all,” Gabe Nir said.

“At first it was like knocking sound. Like somebody is hanging pictures. It would stop. Then more knocking. Then it was more intense,” Sara Nir said. Then came a particularly loud sound, she said. “I was really mad and I left the apartment,” Sara Nir said. She knew the exact time. “My phone was in front of me and I was checking my emails and messages and I thought, OK, I’m going for a few seconds to go to security,” Sara Nir said.


Shamoka Furman, the guard, had heard the sound, too, but told Nir she thought it was the elevator. “I heard like a boom boom but I thought it was the elevator because no alarms went off or anything like that,” Furman later explained to police. Her account is captured on the footage from the responding officers’ body cameras.

1:15

Shamoka Furman “Another boom boom comes. That’s when I heard a Throooom,” Furman said when she was recounting the story to police officers later.

When she calls 911 she describes it as an explosion.

1:16

The pool deck collapses

1:18

Adriana Sarmiento, “I sit in an open space in the [Solara] pool area and I feel a collapse — boom — and a puff of air, a wind kicked up, after the collapse of the roof of the [Champlain] parking area,” Sarmiento told the Herald. “A wind came out of the garage because the area where we were was in front of the [Champlain] garage. We had a line of sight. This wind passed in front of me and moved the plants in front of me but didn’t move those where I was sitting or other areas,” she said. “And car alarms began to go off. And the streams of water began. And I began to look around everywhere, and try to determine where the sounds were coming from because it was strange and I knew something was happening.”

-------------

I'm not going to paste the entire article but y'all need to actually read it to follow the time line.
I never said "when" Furman smelled something so potent she couldn't breathe.. Maud please stop misquoting me.

 

[SwinnyGG]

I can't believe we went this deep talking about witness statements mentioning 'explosions'.

I'm having flashbacks to WTC collapse conspiracy theorists going off for similar reasons.

When you read witness statements, remember who the source is. None of these people are EOD technicians. None of these people are soldiers who know what it's like to be near a live grenade. The odds that anyone giving a witness statement on this issue has ever heard an ACTUAL, legitimate explosion in their entire life is, at best, minimal.

You're talking about a bunch of Johnnie and Jackie Q Publics, trying to describe an extremely intense experience. They are trying to reconstruct verbally, without the benefit of intricate engineering vocabulary, an experience which without a doubt was extremely confusing, terrifying for all involved, came on in the middle of the night and woke many/most of them from a dead sleep, and which they all experienced in the midst of a king-size adrenaline hit. None of those factors make a lucid recollection likely. When you compound them, they multiply.

I am very confident that the lead-up to this collapse involved a great deal of loud noises. I'm also confident that, because of a lack of experience, the confusion, the adrenaline, and just not knowing any better, MOST people are going to describe just about any loud, unfamiliar noise from an unknown source as 'an explosion'.

That word carries very different meaning to the general public than it does to people who, just as an example, know the difference between a detonation and a conflagration. In my opinion this group is reading into the use of the word way, way too much. I don't trust witness statements for anything other than a very rough reconstruction of the timeline. For specific details, they are generally useless.

The same line of thought applies to these vague descriptions of smells. When the building collapsed, it obviously produced a massive amount of dust and debris. Collapsed and/or demolished buildings don't smell like Chanel No. 5. Just as these people are not explosives experts, they aren't used to being around demolished buildings either.

I think any search for a 'smoking gun' via the descriptions of noises or smells coming out of witness statements is, frankly, a waste of time.

 

[Optical98]

Here's an idea. How about actually contributing to the discussion/conversation instead of posting badgering and mocking comments about others members off this thread? Because people keep misquoting me, I have had to revisit this same topic over and over, and I did say "use whatever adjective you like" regarding "explosion"!

 

[SwinnyGG]

How about actually contributing to the discussion/conversation

I believe that attempting to guide the discussion away from blind alleys IS contributing. You're free to disagree.

I'm not 'badgering' you, and I'm certainly not mocking you in any way. It's not a personal attack; I'd suggesting a little relaxation here. I'm attempting to remind anyone who reads this that witness statements, while valuable in some ways, should be treated with a little dose of skepticism on some topics- in this case specifically the use of the word 'explosion'. That's it.

We can't 'use whatever adjective we like' when discussing specific witness statements, unless we want to corrupt them. Which we shouldn't. We should extract what value from them we can, which is only what we know is useful. The rest we should view as anecdotal information only.

 

[Demented]

The odds that anyone giving a witness statement on this issue has ever heard an ACTUAL, legitimate explosion in their entire life is, at best, minimal.

I never heard the explosion that went off a dozen feet from my head, just ringing for a few years that still occasionally comes back. I doubt what they heard was an explosion, especially since no one mentions feeling it, and that pressure wave is unmistakable.

Optica98, I don't feel Swinny's posts is badgering at all. He makes a very good point. Chasing these sounds and smells is a waste of time and although the timeline is helpful for some aspects, we are indeed dealing with statements from vastly untrained and emotional people who were through a hell of an ordeal. Many of these people describe the same noises in different ways, from it being an "exploded down" sound, the sound of a jet liner passing close by, construction noises, booms, etc. Some residents even describe the noise of the pile driving at the construction next door as being extremely loud, which from my experience both visually looking at the dB meter and audibly without hearing protection in, is quieter than the crane hoisting the piles and drivers.

If an explosion did occur, the couple in the pool at the adjacent property would have noticed that before the deck collapse. Car alarms in the general vicinity would also be going off. Dogs for miles would be barking. First responders would have reported hearing it before ever getting the first call to respond. Residents in adjacent buildings would have been woken more than they were. Not saying there wasn't a huge amount of sound at the building, but an explosion most certainly wasn't one.

 

[Optical98]

No one is reading the entirety of what I post.

Demented please scroll up and read the stmt from Arianna a 1:18 am... car alarms did go off.

 

[Demented]

Yes, in the building. Not blocks away.

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

 

[SwinnyGG]

No one is reading the entirety of what I post.

We are reading your posts.

I feel I can speak for Demented in this case in that while I (and I suspect he) read your post, we don't feel that there is any compelling evidence for a real 'explosion'. The noise, vibrations, 'puffs' of 'wind', are all explain-able as results of things in the building collapsing. Not exploding.

 

[Spartan5]

These sounds were heard BEFORE anything was seen to have fallen. So no it was not the damn pool deck.
Knocking and banging were heard from about 12:30am, that steadily got louder to the point the noises were described as BOOMs.

The progressive failure of the pool deck, originating away from (adjacent to the pool for instance) and progressing towards the building would explain most if not all of the noises that have been described that evening.

1:16

The pool deck collapses

Says who?

That’s what’s hilarious to me about all of this. Most of these witness “statements” are hearsay, and contorted to fit into different boxes. And then somehow it capturing it in a spreadsheet lends it an air of enhanced credibility.

 

[Optical98]

SwinnyGG

There it is, the "conspiracy theory..911" bit.

You say we can not take the witness stmts aka "Jackq public" seriously, they have no idea what they really heard?
I hope they never peruse this forum to see how little You value their statements.

However then you go on to say we can't change or propose other adjectives to contemplate what they heard, but YOU use the words "Detonate"?

No one on here or any witness has used that word, but YOU.

 

[Spartan5]

It’s also hilarious seeing all of you people who have joined subsequent to and only to discuss this event lecturing each other about how the forum is supposed to work. That functionally, along with most of the knowledgeable professionals, left around twelve of these posts ago.

It also appears that most that remain have little in the way of practical professional engineering experience regarding the matters at hand. Then there’s the sensationalism and self-promotion that’s gotten wrapped into this.

These threads are living up to the sub-forum’s billing all right.

 

[Optical98]

Spartan

Read the Miami Herald article yourself.

All of you can take up your issues with the statements and the time line with journalists that wrote the article instead of badgering me.

 

[Spartan5]

If nonsense is being presented here, I’ll address it here.

 

[Optical98]

Spartan

Then address the post and the time-line that I copied from the article.
What time do you think the pool deck fell?

Thanks

 

[Spartan5]

I did. It’s nonsense.

You’re welcome