THE cause of the Florida condo collapse that left 98 people dead has been revealed by federal investigators five years after the incident.
A 12-story beachfront condo building fell to the ground in Surfside, Florida, in the middle of the night on June 24, 2021, claiming the lives of 98 people.
At the time of the collapse, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the building “literally pancaked.”
The cause of the collapse has been under investigation by federal officials for years, and a new technical findings report released on Monday has finally revealed the cause of the incident.
“Following an extensive technical investigation, the team has concluded that the collapse began in early June 2021, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed,” the report said.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Construction Safety Team said there were failures with the columns three weeks before the deadly collapse.
The initial column failures caused cracks to grow and loads to redistribute in the pool deck, which resulted in the transfer of their loads to adjacent columns that were not strong enough to support them.
“This led to the larger catastrophic collapse on June 24,” NIST said.
Judith Mitrani-Reiser, a co-leader of the investigation said that while building structures are designed to support more of a load than they are expected to bear, the Champlain Towers South’s margins against failure “were too narrow from the start.”
Glenn Bell, the other leader of the investigation, said the low margins against failure were a result of two factors.
“First, severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day, but also some limitations in those codes and standards,” he said.
“And second, deviations in the building’s construction from the design drawings.”
Families of the victims said they were disappointed in how long the investigation took.
“The federal government spent nearly $40 million, allocated every resource they needed, and they came back with pretty much nothing,” Martin Langesfeld, who lost his sister and brother-in-law in the incident, told WPLG.
“Disappointed. Very disappointed. We waited five years.”
“It’s scary, because how many other buildings could potentially be ticking time bombs as well,” Langesfeld said.
Langesefeld told NPR the collapse is “more than just names. It’s stories. It’s families.”
“It’s an unfortunate reminder of how big this tragedy was.”
First responders rushed to the scene to pull survivors from the debris after the building collapsed around 1:30am.
Two-thirds of the building collapsed after the pool deck caved in, and just minutes later the tower began to fall as occupants were sleeping.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16564244/surfside-condo-collapse-cause-final-report/
