99 unaccounted for
How to know if your condo tower is safe
No one knows yet why a 40-year-old, 12-story condo building collapsed in Surfside, but there’s no doubt that the miles and miles of towers in South Florida are susceptible to deterioration.
Many of them were built in the 1970s and ’80s as an era of condo living exploded across the region. Although they are subject to periodic inspections, people living in high-rises now wonder how safe their own homes are.
Here’s what you should know.
How often do buildings require safety inspections?
High-rises that reach their 40-year anni
versaries are required to have structural inspections, said Greg Batista, owner of G. Batista Engineering & Construction in Davie.
The requirement is center in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, where the most condos are situation. Cities usually oversee the process.
Ken Director, chair of the statewide practice group at the Becker & Poliakoff law firm in Fort Lauderdale, represents the Champlain condo association where Thursday’s collapse happened. He told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that the building was about to undergo its 40-year recertification.
“This is going to be a very, very substantial series of issues and questions, many of which are not answered,” he said.
But Stuart Sobel, a construction lawyer at Siegfried Rivera in Coral Gables, isn’t certain an inspection would have exposed the problem that led to the collapse.
“The 40-year certification is intended for exactly this kind of stuff — after 40 years there can be deterioration,” he said. “But without knowing what caused this collapse it’s impossible to say if they had done the certification last year, or five years ago or 10 years ago that it could have been avoided. We just don’t know how it came about.”
How many older condos are there in South Florida
Despite all of South Florida’s gleaming new buildings, many have reached the 40-year plateau. The exact number is unknown, but Batista said he has performed “hundreds” of recertification inspections over the years.
What do engineers look for when they inspect the buildings?
The focus is on a building’s structural integrity and the electrical systems, Batista said. It is up to the engineering firm to decide whether to test the concrete and rebar or whether to rely on a visual inspection.
Sobel said the inspections “should be significant comfort” for residents. “There buildings are designed to last 75 years or longer,” even the older ones.
“The overwhelming majority are perfectly safe,” Sobel said. “Unfortunately when something like this happens — it’s just inexplicable. And it just makes you realize that nobody is promised tomorrow.”
Can the public see the inspection results?
Attorney Larry Tolchinsky, of the Fort Lauderdale law firm Sachrin & Tolchinsky P.A., said owners are entitled to see the books
and records of the condo association. Less certain is whether a prospective buyer has that right. A buyer usually receives only the articles of incorporation and bylaws.
The disaster, Tolchinsky said, raises the question of whether the recertifications are sufficient.
“I don’t know that a 40-year inspection is going to be good enough now, especially for these waterfront condos,” he said. “This is very worrisome.”
Are the barrier islands a particular risk?
Director, the Fort Lauderdale lawyer, believes the collapse “is going to extend ripple effects up and down the coast in terms of engineering to find out what is developing under the ground of these buildings.”
Batista worries that some building owners are waiting too long to address problems uncovered by inspections.
“It is understood buildings along the coastline are more susceptible to the reinforcing steel inside the buildings to erode,” he said. “A lot of people don’t know any better than to kick the can down the road. I’m not saying that happened in [the Surfside] case.”
Are buildings facing the ocean more susceptible to damage from rain, wind and saltwater?
“Anyone on the east side knows there is a degradation quickly of the east-facing concrete,” said Greg Schlesinger, a general contractor and construction lawyer with Schlesinger Law Offices in Fort Lauderdale. Exposure to saltwater causes the cracking and flaking of concrete, which in turn can cause the loss of the building’s structural integrity.
The results can be “cataclysmic.” “When I go out in the field and see the east-facing portions of the buildings, man, do they weather quickly,” he said.
The Champlain Tower South was facing the ocean.
Are buildings safer if they were built after Hurricane Andrew in 1992?
Sobel called Andrew a “paradigm shift.” “The code improvements since Andrew are dramatic remarkable and effective,” he said, In the early 2000s, there were five hurricanes in one season and “one after the next caused no damage.”
But the suggestion that pre-Andrew buildings are more likely to falter is not a given. Sobel said he lives in a home built in 1948 that has persevered through decades of storms .The home is “structurally strong and structurally sound.”