In an aerial view, an open lot where the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building once stood is seen June 22, 2022 in Surfside, Florida. Ninety-eight people died when the building partially collapsed on June 24, 2021.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In an aerial view, an open lot where the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building once stood is seen June 22, 2022 in Surfside, Florida. Ninety-eight people died when the building partially collapsed on June 24, 2021.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
MIAMI — More than two years after 98 people were killed in a Florida condo tower collapse, federal investigators have released new details about the cause of the collapse. They focus on the building’s pool deck construction flaws.
Structural engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology say it’s one of the most complex surveys ever undertaken. It started days after the 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside.
In a progress report, one of the team’s leaders, Glenn Bell, said the investigation continues to focus on the condo tower’s pool deck. Investigators have previously said they found significant design and construction issues that made the bridge weaker than required by building codes.
The team also discovered issues in the way the concrete columns that supported the building were constructed. During a meeting at NIST headquarters in Maryland, Bell said, “These additional construction gaps further reduce the strength of the pool deck slab-to-column connections from the already compromised conditions I reported in June. »
Investigators continue to cite problems with the pool deck as their ‘primary failure hypothesis’, the reason the 12-story, 40-year-old building collapsed without warning within seconds. The NIST team says it is still investigating 24 other possible failure hypotheses, although it plans to begin refining this field soon.
NIST has already spent more than $20 million on the investigation. The team moved tons of concrete columns, flooring and other rubble to a warehouse where they were subjected to extensive testing. It is a meticulous operation and requires a lot of work.
Investigators have asked former residents and members of the public to provide any photos or videos they may have of the building collapse. At the meeting, Bell showed stills from video retrieved from a motion-activated camera that provided investigators with intriguing information in the final moments of the building’s collapse.
Investigator Judith Mitrani-Reiser said the team had recovered 24 computer hard drives that may contain video and were actively working to rebuild seven of them. She said: “If even one of these seven had a short amount of footage, it would have a huge impact on our investigation.”
Meanwhile, family members of those who died at Surfside are impatient with the inquest and unhappy with plans to build a new building on the site. One of the attendees at the NIST meeting in Maryland on Thursday was Martin Langesfeld. His sister Nicole and brother-in-law Luis Sadovnic died in the collapse. At the meeting, he asked, “How can we even consider building a new developer on this land when we haven’t yet figured out why it collapsed in the first place, taking 98 lives with it? ?
In Surfside, city officials recently approved a developer’s plans to build a new 12-story condominium on the site of the collapse. Family members of those who died objected, in part because it would allow a memorial to their loved ones to be placed next to a loading dock. Langesfeld also believes the federal government should step in and prevent any work from starting at the site until the NIST investigation is complete, which isn’t expected until 2025.
USA News Gb1