Revealed: Miami condo board warned of
'significantly worse' damage in April letter
and hit owners with $15m repair bill weeks
before it collapsed as it's revealed
developers skirted building codes to add
penthouse
Daily Mail (UK),
by
Harriet Alexander
&
Jennifer Smith
Original Article
Posted By: Imright,
6/29/2021 10:53:46 AM
The condo board of the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Miami told residents that concrete damage had become 'significantly worse' in an April letter where they gave them a $15.5million bill for the repairs. The damage was first identified in 2018 by an engineer who had been hired to review the building as part of the recertification but nothing was done to fix it.
Instead, the condo board spent the next two years selecting a committee to oversee the work and hiring the engineer - Frank Morabito - along with a manager - Scott Stewart.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
justavoter 6/29/2021 10:58:21 AM (No. 830289)
Cha Ching.....lawsuits on the way big time.
8 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
lynngirl122 6/29/2021 11:08:27 AM (No. 830301)
Uh oh.
7 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
jimboscott 6/29/2021 11:08:47 AM (No. 830302)
Assuming 125 units (I think I read that somewhere), this would have been an assessment of about 680.00/month for 15 years for each unit.
Moral of the story? Condos are a bad idea.
19 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
NorthernDog 6/29/2021 11:09:36 AM (No. 830303)
Part of the problem with condo boards are the positions are usually voluntary and the members are tasked with making decisions that have huge financial impacts. In general, no one wants to fork out tens of thousands of dollars for building repairs when ''so far everything is OK''.
13 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
EJKrausJr 6/29/2021 11:11:39 AM (No. 830308)
Who okayed the original construction of the buildings? Who inspected the original construction? The decay of the building over forty years, is it normal? Structurally, the building was not sound, for how long? Were substandard materials used in the construction? Was the construction up to code? Too many questions.
13 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
GoodDeal 6/29/2021 11:39:33 AM (No. 830344)
The foundation carries all of the structural loads from the roof on down. When the foundation failed it caused an upward structural collapse. Unlike the World Trade Center where the top floors collapsed first and led to a pancake downward collapse. The penthouse addition may have added new loads that weren’t calculated in the original design that overdressed the existing structure.
8 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
paral04 6/29/2021 11:59:02 AM (No. 830376)
The burning issue here is, why didn't they repair the damage when reported in 2018?
8 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
hershey 6/29/2021 12:02:38 PM (No. 830382)
The sharks are lining up and I don't mean the ones in the ocean...the truth always comes out, eventually...strange but true, we've been watching Endeavour, a Brit detective series and the episode day before yesterday involved a building collapse caused by salt eroding the concrete...
8 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
DVC 6/29/2021 12:57:05 PM (No. 830464)
In the wide open, drug money fueled '80s in Miami, it will be interesting to see if the building codes were followed, if all the necessary rebar was actually there, if the concrete had all the portland cement it was supposed to have. And was the foundation design OK? None of these things can be seen after the fact, so there is a lot of folks who want to cheat "just a little bit" to save money and time. And since it was 40 years ago, most will be dead and buried, money long spent.
A poster here linked to the forensic engineering report on the bridge collapse in Miami in 2018. The Executive Summary reports that the design was 'insufficient' or something like that, nice words for 'dangerous', or 'incompetent'. And the design engineer was told that the bridge (during assembly, partially assembled, but already over an active road) had many large cracks, and the cracks were widening each day.
Over five days, the design engineer did nothing, and finally the partially assembled bridge collapsed, crushing cars on the road. If, during that long period, the bridge had been 'shored' (temporary supports added) and the road closed, lives would have been saved, and perhaps the bridge could have been saved, too. Those moves were extremely obvious....yet not done.
The "experts" hired to validate, oversee and verify the safety of the design and construction, were incompetent, too. The construction company....you guessed it, incompetent, too. All the rules were broken, repeatedly. All the people who were "experts" weren't, or at least made major errors that any real expert wouldn't make.
If you want to be chilled....just read the Executive Summary. It's not long, but it is ugly, even though 'cleaned up' with nice language. It makes you wonder what will be found about the construction and inspection of this condo, once they get serious about looking into it.
https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/2019-12/2019_r_03.pdf
6 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
SkeezerMcGee 6/29/2021 1:44:31 PM (No. 830515)
Experts regarding building collapses are licking their chops when thinking of the potentially massive expert witness fees that may result from this disaster.
0 people like this.
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