Searching for answers after Florida condo collapse
What happened
Rescue teams intensified their search for survivors amid the wreckage of a collapsed Miami-area condo tower this week, with some digging through the rubble with their hands, even as the chances of anyone being found alive rapidly diminished. At least 16 people have been confirmed dead and nearly 150 remain missing following the unexplained cave-in of Champlain Towers South, a 13-story beachside condo in Surfside, Fla. “We have people waiting and waiting and waiting,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said of the families of the missing. “That is excruciating.” Constructed in 1981, the building abruptly crumpled as residents slept last week. Minutes before the collapse, one now missing resident told her husband over the phone that she saw the pool deck crater into the parking garage below—then the line went dead. Another resident, Marian Lopez, opened the door of her sixth-floor apartment and saw sky and beach where her neighbors’ doors once stood. “That complete side of the building was not there,” she said.
An investigation into what may be the deadliest accidental building collapse in U.S. history is now underway. Three years before the collapse, an engineer warned of a “major error” in the building’s design—waterproofing below the pool deck and entrance drive had been placed on a flat slab rather than a sloped surface, allowing water to accumulate—and noted “abundant cracking” of beams and supporting columns, crumbling concrete, and the corrosion of steel reinforcements. A $12 million program to repair that damage was set to start soon. Structural engineers said other factors could have played a role in the collapse, including the gradual sinking of the reclaimed wetland underneath the building.
What the editorials said
The sheer scale of this tragedy is hard to fathom, said the New York Daily News. The tower’s residents came from at least half a dozen nations, including Argentina, Colombia, Israel, and Venezuela. Among the presumed dead are “aging snowbirds from parts north, young families building their lives.” And for now, “there seems to be no clear culprit, either individual or institutional.”
“We’d be fools not to wonder” whether South Florida’s “sordid history of shoddy building practices” might be to blame, said the Miami Herald. The 1980s construction boom was an era of “slipshod construction and look-theother-way enforcement.” Could faulty construction have allowed enough corrosive saltwater and sea spray to penetrate the concrete and doom the building? Florida updated its building codes after Hurricane Andrew destroyed some 25,500 homes in 1992. “This disaster must serve as yet another turning point.”
What the columnists said
For Florida’s largest metro area, the catastrophe has “a very deep and terrifying resonance,” said Steve Bousquet in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. High-rise condos line our barrier beaches; they’re
“as much a part of our collective psyche as air-conditioning and the I-95.” Our community has long prepared for hurricanes, but it’s not clear we’ve paid enough attention to quieter threats such as subsidence; one recent study found Champlain Towers had sunk about 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s. This collapse “will understandably cause a lot of anxiety for a lot of people for a long time.”
Investigators may find multiple causes behind this disaster, said Lizette Alvarez in The Washington Post. Residents said that construction at the condo building next door shook their apartments, and perhaps ongoing repairs to Champlain South’s roof played a role. “One thing is for sure: In Florida, water is always a prime suspect.” The building’s underground garage apparently routinely flooded with seawater. It’s possible that a column, critically corroded by saltwater, simply gave way and set off a structural avalanche.
Climate change will only intensify Florida’s water woes, said The Economist. Sea levels around Miami are rising at an average of 9 millimeters a year, three times the global average, and ever “more buildings will be exposed to stresses they were not designed to withstand.” Towers in Surfside currently need only be given thorough inspections every 40 years; in our age of rapid climatic change, “more regular assessments and potential retrofits” must be a priority for any coastal community.