Owners at Champlain Towers South were told in 2018 that their building needed structural repairs, but the repairs weren’t scheduled to begin until later this year, i.e., a three-year interval. That’s enough time for the Chinese to build an entire city. I’m wondering if our love of process, which sometimes results in more durable structures, is a double-edged sword. If a structure is discovered not to be durable, a multi-year process before repairs can begin results in multiple years of vulnerability.
How much do we love process? Here’s a recent letter regarding what would have been an in-person meeting tonight. There will be deliberate consideration regarding the installation of a hand rail outside a bathroom:
(On Zoom, of course, because Coronapanic continues.)
Related:
- “Miami-Area Condo Owners Pushed Town for Construction Approvals Days Before Collapse” (WSJ): ‘This is holding us up,’ the Champlain Towers South property manager emailed Surfside officials; town manager said no indication of need for emergency action
- “Ten Thousand Commandments 2021” (CEI): “An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State … Regulatory costs of $1.9 trillion amount to 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product… If it were a country, U.S. regulation would be the world’s eighth-largest economy.. If one assumed that all costs of federal regulation flowed all the way down to households, U.S. households would “pay” $14,368 annually on average in a regulatory hidden tax.”
Just imagine how jarring it would be to find a handrail in a historic district where none should be. Thank heavens for local government.
Wrong people in government…paper and process oriented with little understandung of physical reality. The closing of Line 5 pipeline, cancelling Keystone like the delay for Champlain Towers work permitting approvals …done by people who shouldnt have power.
All people in a government are wrong. Because it takes a sociopath to want to lord over others and a fool to believe this to be good.
@averros
You don’t think anyone actually wants to help people and serve their community?
Perhaps its you that’s the sociopath, or just don’t understand that very few people in government jobs get to lord anything over anyone.
@baz – I have yet to see a government action which didn’t come with “or else” backed up by a uniformed thug’s baton.
Government has nothing it didn’t take by force or intimidation from people who did absolutely nothing bad to others.
And, yes, one needs to be a fool not to see that the fundamental feature of government anything is violence.
Oh my God if you start allowing overeducated technocratic white people to install hand rails on historic public buildings to help handicapped people, pretty soon they’ll have Black people living in town.
As far as the rest of what happened at Champlain Towers South is concerned, all I can say – with as much respect for the terribly bereaved who have suffered such an incalculable loss is: “Only in America.” There are so many things that are wrong there it is really impossible to say more and be concise and respectful at the same time. I’m very sorry for everyone who lost people they love – forever – but it should be very carefully studied and there are lots of things that were wrong, went wrong, and shouldn’t have gone wrong.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was once in a fraternity at a pretty good University. They had an old house and liked to invite hundreds of people over for parties, who danced and spilled all kinds of liquids on the old flooring inside the house, which seeped down through the floorboards and began to rot the floor joists, to the point that you could watch the floor bend from the basement when people jumped on it upstairs during various events. You could see them bend! I was worried about it. I said to the chapter president at a meeting:
“I think we should do something about this, it’s pretty bad, and one night, the floor adjacent to the Chapter Room could collapse into the basement. I have a plan.”
He said: “It will require permits to do any kind of major work on the floors and cost a lot of money.”
I said: “This won’t. It’s totally legal, it’ll cost about $300, we can do it in three hours, and we can take it out if we need to.”
I won’t describe exactly what we did, but it was a sound and strong way to provide extra support to the floor joists supporting that room, taking into account the span of the beams and the concrete slab underneath. I used some freeware blueprint software to draw up the plans and showed them to a couple of guys who were engineering students. Everyone agreed it was a good idea, and had the virtue that it could be removed if necessary. At the next meeting it was voted up. We went to Home Depot and bought all the stuff, put it together on a Saturday, bolted it in place and one of the guys who previously didn’t like me very much said: “You know, Alex, I have to admit, this was a good idea.” That was the process, and it worked perfectly for as long as I was around there I never heard anything bad about it afterward.
I think a lot of things failed at Champlain Towers South and it’s terrible that so many lives were lost as a result.
This may have worked out in the short term, but there are some potential issues I see with this line of thinking:
1. You perceived your mechanical solution to be sound, yet you weren’t qualified to make that determination, nor were you responsible. You can find someone incompetent, yet confident, to wrongly implement a fix or proposed solution to just about anything–especially if there’s money involved. Talk’s cheap. There is good reason that people who are eligible to legally make these determinations, professional engineers, have been educated, have practical experience, and have passed tests and are also legally responsible and accountable for their actions. That accountability can be civil, criminal and financial. I bet the engineer who did the report on the Miami towers three years ago is probably sweating bullets right now, even if he did everything correct. There’s a great deal on the line for him.
2. What if, at some point in the future, a new class decided the easily removable structure you built was an eyesore? What if they assumed that because it was temporary, it wasn’t important. And without knowing any of the specific history of why it was even there as it relates to the damaged beam which you knew specifically about, decided to remove it? What if they weren’t as observant as you were, and never noticed the damaged beams flexing after it’s removal? Not your problem, right?
It was probably fine, and you are probably correct that it was adequate, but the point is that when you let individuals with no qualifications or accountability decide these things which impact the safety of others, it can easily turn bad, because the world has no shortage of confident, unqualified people.
@Senorpablo: As it turns out, we did have a building inspector in the house because all of the upstairs bathrooms had to be completely renovated with all new piping and so forth. He was in the basement also, he saw the assembly we installed and didn’t bat an eye at it when we explained what it was for. At the time we were saving money to resurface all the flooring on the 1st floor in addition to many other renovations (this was an OLD house.) I’m not a structural engineer and freely admit that, but this was a good interim solution and a lot better than doing nothing, and we made sure to note that everyone including newer class members knew what it was for and how and why we decided to put it in there. It wasn’t supposed to be a structural element – just a “backstop” and a buttress.
And I wasn’t “confident” or cocky. Since you’ve “asked” I’ll explain more about what I did: I took the time during that week to locate all the joists and measure them carefully, including the endpoints, and we measured and calculated the estimated loads very carefully. We had 30 guys get in the room and jump up and down in sync. and measured the deflections. I wish I had saved the blueprints – they’re still there as far as I know.
I agree that unqualified or “overconfident” people shouldn’t do major repairs without the proper permits and so forth, but this stuff in Miami dragged on an awfully long time and from what I’ve read, the dangers were visually apparent for some time and getting worse. It’s awful. And it was very likely 100% preventable – they may have decided to demolish the building but at least maybe 150+ people wouldn’t have been killed if there was more urgency applied at every level.
The guy I reference above who didn’t like me very much thought it was a nutty idea for a lot of the reasons you mention but when I took him downstairs and showed him my deflection measurements he changed his mind.
@Senorpablo: And as far as your saying that I wasn’t responsible. I can tell you what horse to **ck yourself with, because I made myself responsible.
@Senorpablo: It might also interest you to know that at the time I was Young Turk who would have made Cenk Uygur blush – a Noam Chomsky devouring, Z-Magazine subscribing Socialist Anarchist. I didn’t want my comrades to fall through the floor!
Finally, I know I’m getting longwinded here, but this was the song that was playing when I first really noticed how bad the floor was bending. It was late at night during a party and there were at least 60 people jumping up and down to the beat on the floor in that room, with a pair of big Marshall speakers supplying the audio through a complex multichannel system. Over 100 people (including me) were in the basement beneath the room at the time, and I was watching the floor/ceiling move.
So this puts an approximate date on the whole story:
Alex – your confidence may have been well founded, but for the sake of argument, there are plenty of confident people who are incompentant. Are there not? And, if you ask them to self asses, you’ll likely get a similar opinion to your own self assessment. What’s the difference? The point remains that confidence does not equate to qualification. I believe you took the matter seriously and had only the best intentions, but people don’t know what they don’t know.
As far as responsibility, how could you possibly be in a position to be responsible if something tragic had happened? Did you have professional insurance or a bond to cover millions of dollars in medical bills and legal fee’s? How could you have made things right if things turned out bad, regardless of how low the odds were? Maybe the fraternity had such insurance, but I doubt that would have prevented the legal devastation en-route to getting it all sorted out. I can tell you that when things like that go bad, everyone and anyone who can be named as a defendant in a lawsuit will be. And, it can take tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it all sorted out, and that money is gone forever regardless of fault.
Bureaucrats know the best answer is always “that’s someone else’s job.” Alex did what he could to avoid a disaster. Alex is true American hero!
@AlexIsAHero: I am not a hero, and I never intended to be one – I just didn’t want to see a bad situation get predictably worse before it could be properly addressed. Senorpablo is the real hero: his last reply demonstrates exactly what I was talking about and better than I could have. Peace out to everyone.
You should try getting a permit to install solar panels. I’m in the process now and it’s moving at the speed of a glacier (before global warming).
The American school of process-oriented nanagement is best described by the popular Russian saying: “пиздеть – не мешки ворочать” (pizdet’ – nye meshki vorochyat'”- to bullsit is easier than to move sacks”). This phrase is commony used to cut short unnecessary deliberations.
The comments sections on this blog are already too FoxNews-ish, now we are even quoting Russian sayings…
Naw, Republicans/Trump/NRA aren’t ‘in’ with the Russians…
Mike, looks like you do not like entities you mentioned. I guess you celebrate diversity until there is a sentence that is not in American English. To make you happier: recently Putin started big gun control push in Russia because Russians did not like his $1 billion sea-side mansion complex (build on hard rock, not on sandy island beach with underground water). So Russia is back in your corner, you can take your large red flag out of the closet and fly it again.
On the other side Russian sentence could be more polite.
Was the problem the permitting for the renovations? I thought the condo members couldn’t agree on putting up the cash
Andrea: I am not sure that the only slow process was permitting. I think that you’re right that the owners and their hired experts took a long time to figure out what made sense to do given that it was going to be super expensive. I don’t think that we can blame the condo structure per se, though. Once a majority of owners decide to do repairs they have a mechanism to force the minority to pay. (Though, again, maybe the process around the forcing is extremely sluggish by Chinese standards!)
Philg – Did you read the first page in the documents linked by the WSJ? Doesn’t sound like a case of failed big gubment and bureaucracy, but of capitalism and greed–the private individuals in charge didn’t want to spend money on something that wasn’t yet their problem. After all, the building was functionally the same as it has been for the last 40 years.
It’s pretty compelling:
“Statement from Town Manager Andrew Hyatt:
The plans received by the Town of Surfside beginning on May 12, 2021, were preliminary and clearly marked “not for construction. ” The Town’s position is that these plans were not final. In fact, no applications for construction permits were submitted. It would appear that the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association sought to address a number of issues outside the scope of any proposed 40-year re-certification work such as the installation of new natural gas service and delivery lines, the reconfiguration of existing parking, the moving of parking off site, and other repairs. There was no indication during any communications between the Town and the association by telephone or electronic mail that this submission required emergency action by the Town of Surfside. The scope of work for repairs was not received until June 21, 2021, and not in the form of a building application. To date, no permit application for these specific repairs has been received by the Town.”
How would you feel about deregulation of aircraft maintenance–just let the owners decide when and what to maintain? The engine was running just fine, until it wasn’t.
Senorpablo: By “love of process” I didn’t mean to include only government. So if the condo owners dithered amongst themselves and/or dithered with hired experts, that’s also a sluggish American process.
The only people who make money are lawyers. The lawyers & expert witnesses need their cut of everything. Soon, commenting on a blog will require a panel of expert witnesses.
lion2, the people who throw these eyesores up on the beach and sell them on to naive inlanders also make money, up front and decades before any problems appear. The condominium ownership structure does not have the accountability of a sole owner landlord.
These structures should have extra safety margins and compliance inspections because NOBODY WILL EVER LOOK CLOSELY AT THE PROJECT AGAIN.
Remember to call your lawyer, check your insurance policy, and consult an engineer to have your plans reviewed and approved before intervening in a situation like this (scroll up to see the people jumping on the railing):
https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1413675814303019013