Thread by @FreedomFriesInc

(1) #SurfsideBuildingCollapse Thread #4

Welcome to my stream of consciousness tweeting about active emergency management events. I am an EM geek with professional and (sadly) personal experience to share.

Link to earlier Surfside threads:

https://twitter.com/FreedomFriesInc/status/1408975661574672387

(2) To recap, I was in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand on 2/22/2011 when the lack of a quality engineering report killed 115 people.

An earthquake triggered the collapse BUT obvious damage from an earlier, smaller quake had been missed by local officials.

(3) This point is highly relevant to the engineering reporting process getting underway in Florida after Surfside.

Like in Christchurch, building inspectors & officials are hastily designing a reporting system that is not sufficiently geared to find which buildings are at risk.

(4) I know the officials mean well, but the public are going to have to pressure them to work harder to be thorough so that this >160 people mass casualty event is not repeated in the coming months and years.

Please learn from our tragedy. It was just like Surfside.

(5) Once we Kiwis figured out we couldn't trust any of our multi story buildings not to pancake on us without warning, we started refusing to use them.

I literally chose different businesses to use. The ripple affect impacted the whole country's economy for a few years.

(6) You cannot afford to just keep using buildings that are similar in design, construction, and age as the building in Surfside was, without a very robust expert opinion.

The same goes for large buildings anywhere on coastal ground that may have been or is becoming unstable.

(7) This story is full of red flags for me. And probably, if you showed the information about this collapse, and then the story below, to a random sample of Kiwis, they would all be as alarmed as I am.

Sloppy work gets people killed.

(8) A city or county building dept does not have the requisite specialized engineers in-house to design a process that will give the public enough reasonable confidence to want to go back into high risk buildings right away.

The wider engineering profession must be involved.

(9) In this situation you dont "urge" property owners to obtain reports and file them within 45 days.

You REQUIRE them to comply with a process that includes a number of things.

>6 storys? No, make it 3 or 4.
>40 yrs old? No, make it 25. Or whatever the industry leaders say.

(9) Regarding the 45 day timeline, it would be better to have a two stage process, of a desktop review of say 5-7 days, then time for the full report.

Occupants need to be told that if they want to vacate for now, they can. Consult your legal advisors. Consult insurers etc etc

(10) The devil is in the detail, as the saying goes.

Asking them to

"... hire an engineer "who has designed (or) inspected at least three buildings of the same or greater height to tell us if they see any signs of distress"

seems an extremely sloppy approach to me.

(11) Look, NZ is a country of 5 million, where the right to sue for damages after personal injury or death was removed from the law 50 years ago.

Yet we could marshal our engineering, geology, and legal experts to get the job done and not lose any more lives in 1980s buildings.

(12) Buildings that, as I understand it, can come crashing down if even one of the concrete columns fails hard enough. On soil that is spitting distance from the ocean and may have had rising seawater corroding the concrete and rebar that is holding the building up.

(13) I am not an engineer, and I try to stay within my area of expertise but for crying out loud...

The next few months concerning this building type, and/or similar ground conditions, will be quite a test of the state and federal governments' skill in emergency response.

(14) In addition to the risk factors within the building, the sea water effect on concrete and rebar, and any as-yet unknown (by me) ground conditions, I just heard reports that this building was constructed on reclaimed land.

Wait, what?

🤦‍♀️

(15) I watch the TV show Massive Engineering Mistakes. If this 12 story concrete building with a large footprint was built on reclaimed land, then I think that term might be euphemistic here.

Surfside is a city of ~6,000 people, with condo blocks up and down the beachfront.

(16) Florida has hastily built coastal suburbs & cities all over. Tampa is where I anticipate ground conditions to one day bite as a result of a hurricane.

Building methods are a bit like cars. The older ones may be more reliable. The 1980s were a low point, in many ways.