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Miami Building Collapse


Bjornebye
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It's awful. You just don't expect something like this to happen in a first world country. However I note that it was built on reclaimed land, and I can see this sort of thing happening even more in the future as the sea claims it back.

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30 minutes ago, johnsusername said:

How does a building just collapse? I'm no engineer, but when I look round town and see buildings which are 100 years old I wonder about the strength of the bricks holding them up. 

This looks like an in-situ concrete frame building, which deflect during both their construction and over their lifespan to acceptable tolerances. If the ground has subsided then it could quite quickly exceed those anticipated deflection limits and small cracks turn in to big cracks and, if also not properly designed for disproportionate collapse, then you end up with a catastrophe. Or it could be that the foundations weren't deep enough, or hydrostatic pressure built up over the years or there were flaws in the concrete mix. All sorts can go wrong, it just usually doesn't.

 

This is an absolute tragedy.

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45 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Imagine being a resident in the flats around that building. You’d be wanting out right away. I wouldn’t be able to sleep 

I doubt many will now. You'd be shitting yourself every team you heard a creak.

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The most liklely cause is unauthorised or insufficiently engineered alterations. If they were in or around the core, it would not take a great deal of change of loading to dramatically alter the stresses on the structure. Once one component fails, it trasfers the load to adjacent components and if these have not been engineered for such a load it also fails until such times as it reaches the catastrophic failure point which is when the whole lot comes down.

There is a phrase oft used in modern building structures "add lightness". This is what happens when you get it wrong.

As with the majority of these disasters, the people making wrong decisions are never the victims of these poor chioces.

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14 hours ago, Karl_b said:

This looks like an in-situ concrete frame building, which deflect during both their construction and over their lifespan to acceptable tolerances. If the ground has subsided then it could quite quickly exceed those anticipated deflection limits and small cracks turn in to big cracks and, if also not properly designed for disproportionate collapse, then you end up with a catastrophe. Or it could be that the foundations weren't deep enough, or hydrostatic pressure built up over the years or there were flaws in the concrete mix. All sorts can go wrong, it just usually doesn't.

 

This is an absolute tragedy.

 

This building had been sinking at a rate of @ 2 mm each year. I think that is on par with many urban high rises.

 

Unfortunately there seems to be a timeline of negative inspections/analysis of the structure (read costly)  that were ignored by the residents.

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There's a report from 3 years ago just released that highlights a design flaw present from construction which prevented proper drainage. Looks like someone's professional indemnity insurance will be taking a kicking soon.

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6 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

There's a report from 3 years ago just released that highlights a design flaw present from construction which prevented proper drainage. Looks like someone's professional indemnity insurance will be taking a kicking soon.

All here 

Florida building collapse: Report from 2018 warned of 'major damage' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57621774

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1 hour ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

There's a report from 3 years ago just released that highlights a design flaw present from construction which prevented proper drainage. Looks like someone's professional indemnity insurance will be taking a kicking soon.

Everyone will -  the officers in the Conado Assoc - the cities inspectors - the individual owners'  insurances etc.

 

There was a class action lawsuit filed the next day.

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