After Miami collapse, builders recall lessons from Berkeley
The collapse of a 13story beachfront concrete tower in Miami would seem to have little to do with the failure of a wooden balcony in a fivestory student apartment building in Berkeley.
But for the structural engineers and building inspectors charged with the unglamorous but important business of keeping multifamily structures safe, the two incidents are linked by tragedy. They’re also connected by the sense that lives could have been saved if society paid more attention to how our places of residence are
not only constructed but maintained against the ravages of time.
So far 22 bodies have been pulled out of the rubble at Champlain Towers South, the MiamiDade concrete midrise that crumbled a week ago. There are 128 are still missing.
While it’s still too early to draw conclusions about the cause of the Florida tragedy, for Bay Area building inspectors and structural engineers it has brought back memories of the last deadly Bay Area building failure, the 2015 collapse of a balcony at 2020 Kittredge St. in Berkeley, an incident that killed five Irish college students in the United States on work visas, as well as one American student.
And if the Berkeley balcony collapse is any indication, the seaside condo failure will likely prompt a slew of local and statewide ordinances concerning building safety inspections.
“Any prudent city or state is now going to be on high alert to do what California did after the Berkeley tragedy,” said Tom Miller, an attorney who represents homeowners associations throughout California. “There will be a push to strengthen inspection requirements for key components of the building that affect its safety and structural integrity.”
The Berkeley disaster prompted lawmakers and building officials to focus on the safety of “exterior elevated elements,” such as decks, balconies and walkways. Berkeley scrambled to inspect all of its buildings while former San Mateo state Sen. Jerry Hill authored two successful bills requiring that decks and walkways be inspected every nine years. The first, passed in 2017, applied to rental buildings with more than three units. Then in 2018, a second bill expanded the mandatory inspections to condominiums as well.
Condo associations now have until January of 2025 to complete their first inspection. Jim Schlagel, an inspector with California Deck Inspection, said that the response to the statewide legislation has been muted. Some of the larger management companies, like AvalonBay, have been proactively getting inspections done for all their complexes, but most owners have not. There are roughly 1.3 million buildings in California covered by the two Senate bills.
“Nobody is rushing to get them done,” Schlagel said. “The legislation is largely unknown to most mom and pop owners. There is a high level of unawareness.”
Attorney Steve Tinnelly, who works with homeowners associations, said that HOAs typically put off the inspections as long as possible, fearful that it will lead to special assessments. And oftentimes HOA members reject special assessments even if recommended by the board.
“A lot of HOAs think their job is to keep assessments low when their real job is to maintain the integrity of the assets, which not only affects property values but also can save lives,” he said. “It’s a thankless job to serve on a board. You do it as a good neighbor and citizen. But it’s hard work and you’re not getting paid. At a certain point the last thing you want to tell your neighbors is, ‘You have to pay an extra $10,000 or $20,000.’ ”
In California, special assessments require membership approval, although they can circumvent members in emergencies when life safety is threatened.
The Bay Area doesn’t have the sort of mid or highrise beachfront condos that are common along Florida’s sandy coast, but many of the highrise buildings in downtown San Francisco and Mission Bay are constructed on bay mud — which can allow buildings to settle more than expected, as was the case with the Millennium Tower.
In California, most HOAs pay close attention to potential condo construction defects for the first 10 years after the building is completed, because that is the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit against the builder, according to Miller. Most Bay Area construction defect lawsuits involve waterproofing — podium decks, often with swimming pools and landscaped terraces, typically leak into the parking garage or units below. Some of the new highrises in downtown San Francisco have had issues with metal skin corrosion and the glass curtain walls leaking.
Once that 10year window is closed, the homeowner associations facing expensive repairs have three choices: dip into reserves, which may or may not have sufficient funds; propose charging homeowners a special assessment, which may be rejected by a majority of members; or, in extreme cases, take out a bank loan, which could put the HOA in the red and compromise future expenses.
None of them are particularly appealing.
“Once you are past the statute and there is no available source of revenue, it becomes a very difficult balancing act for any HOA board,” said Miller.
Grace S. Kang, a structural engineer at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, said the Florida collapse would likely lead to widespread local and state building code changes.
“The lessons learned from the balcony failure in Berkeley were quickly implemented at the local level,” said Kang. “Professional organizations banded together and advised city councils so they could make informed decisions on the local level.”
She said that the Florida disaster likely would prompt a heightened look at concrete buildings across California. Los Angeles is already doing a survey of older concrete buildings, and San Francisco is about to launch a concrete building program “to further inform and assist building owners in how to maintain their building, comply with the building codes, and protect the public,” according to Patrick Hannan, communications director of the Department of Building Inspection.
Schlagel said that most of the decks he has inspected for owners looking to comply with the new state laws have been in good shape.
“There was one deck in an apartment complex in L.A. where I immediately called the property manager and said, ‘You’ve got to get someone on this right away, or someone is going to get hurt,’ ” he said.
Tinnelly said that one “silver lining” of the Miami collapse is that association boards likely will be more compelling in convincing members to spend money on maintenance.
“It will likely give boards more motivation and more courage to say, ‘This is why we need this assessment. We don’t want to become the next Miami,’ ” he said.