8/16/2023 0 Comments Champlain tower south video![]() ![]() The previous year, condo board member Mara Chouela sent an email to the town of Surfside complaining that developers of the project next door in Miami Beach were “digging too close to our property” causing residents to have “concerns regarding the structure of our building.”Īttached were two photos of a backhoe. On at least one occasion, equipment scraped along the privacy wall, putting gouges in the non-structural concrete block wall around the pool area, engineers Jonathan Bain and Frank Morabito noted in a 2020 report conducted on behalf of the Champlain South condo association. ![]() For years, equipment used for demolition and construction drove back and forth along the wall. The street was torn out and replaced with a much narrower walkway to the beach as part of the Eighty Seven Park project. Lehman’s model showed the sagging was particularly severe in the middle of the deck and along the southern wall, where water used to pool causing problems for the structure, according to construction permits and records from the condo board. The pool deck at Champlain South was too thin, cracking and bowing over the large spans between the columns holding it up, computer modeling showed. So Lehman and her team shifted their focus farther south, to an area of the pool deck burdened with heavy planters that were not supported by beams, where the collapse revealed significant problems along the southern perimeter wall, a below-ground-level structural element made of reinforced concrete. And the first sounds of collapse were heard as Vásquez and Accardi drove into the garage, through the exact area where the assumed concrete failure would have occurred. Sarmiento’s video, which prompted the speculation about an initial concrete failure at the north side of the deck, was taken after the deck collapsed, so the visible debris could easily have been a result of the cave-in rather than a cause. One questioner told Bell: “It’s troubling we can’t find an obvious trigger.”īell responded that in his experience investigating structural failures, there is often no single cause.A months-long reconstruction of the timeline eventually undermined all scenarios that put initial concrete failures on the northern edge of the deck. The platforms crashed down into the lobby, killing 114 people and injuring 200 on July 17, 1981, the year Champlain South was built. Various errors and flaws in the Champlain Towers design and construction bear “eerie” similarity to what was found after the collapse of an overhead walkway at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, said project leader Jack Moehle. Investigators said they have so far interviewed 33 people, including survivors, victims’ family members and government officials. “It looks like it was strong but not so durable concrete.” “We’ve observed microstructural changes due to environmental factors,” project leader Scott Jones said. They have obtained 70 concrete cores - about 18% of what they intend to collect. Materials scientists are attempting to replicate the concrete mix used in 1980, which has been problematic because materials used in South Florida have changed significantly over the years. Mitrani-Reiser also said investigators have a memorandum of understanding with the FBI to enhance videos and still images that could provide clues, such as a video taken by a tourist in a nearby hotel showing the north side of Champlain South moments before the building collapsed. “Even absent any sudden overload or obvious initiator of a failure on the night of a collapse, the conditions present on the pool deck slab at that time represented a serious safety concern for the building,” Bell said. He said the weak connections between the pool deck and supporting columns were vulnerable to punching shear - a type of failure where the slab disconnects from the column in a sudden, sweeping collapse. ![]() They concluded the design failed to meet codes and standards and “the lack of compliance was most severe in the pool deck structure,” Bell said.īell said they found the strength in some pool deck locations was only about half of that required at the time of construction, and also would not have complied with current codes. They also analyzed the standards for reinforced concrete design from 40 years ago. ![]() Glenn Bell, team associate leader for the investigation, explained how engineers examined the original building codes and standards from 1980 to determine where construction of Champlain Towers South may have deviated. Those included areas where the pool deck appeared to be sagging dangerously, cracking a nearby planter. The findings echoed reporting done by the Miami Herald in consultation with structural engineers who identified similar weaknesses in the structure and other problems that compounded in the weeks before the collapse. ![]()
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