The critical area of the rubble pile from the collapsed Surfside condominium building can now be reached. The original collapse happened at 1:30am when most were sleeping and the 12-floors of stacked master bedroom suites was unfortunately located next to the unstable elements of the building that did not collapse.
At 10:30pm last evening the remaining building was brought down with a controlled demolition. Now the most important area of the original collapse, the areas containing the rubble of those master suites, will be able to be excavated. As recovery workers began work at 1:00am this morning the focus is on that area. They anticipate a much faster recovery of missing persons.
During a press conference today an additional two bodies were pulled from the area. The death toll now stands at 27 with 115 people still unaccounted. The recovery workers face a grueling task in the next 36 hours; however, fortunately Tropical Storm Elsa has taken a more westerly track and the recovery work looks like it will continue unimpeded on the East coast of Florida. Update from Florida Governor Ron Desantis:
Video of the successful demolition below:
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God bless the people that are able and willing to do this difficult work.
Yes indeed I could not, I think.
So sad. My mother was killed in a house explosion. There was no body..I never accepted it..I feel for the relatives of the people killed here.
I am so sorry for your horrific loss.
Oh how horrible. Sending prayers to you. I can only try to imagine how traumatic it is to see something like this happen and to know so deep in your and psyche what it is like. Prayers… many prayers…
Prayers for you ??
It is a condominium so the building is owned by each apartment owner. They didn’t want to pay the enormous assessment to repair the building that had problems for years. Shame on them. They are all responsible for this disaster.
I am so sorry for your loss. Not being able to say goodbye is the hardest.
Thank you Sundance for the report.
A lot of people were confused by the decision to demolish part of the building. This makes it more clear.
Not to be grim, but I expect there will be more DNA recovered than bodies recovered.
I just cannot imagine what the collapse site smells like.
Grim, difficult, work.
I wish they’d brought in the heavy dozers and equipment after about day 5. You have as much chance at saving a life by quickly getting into the pile than you do killing someone still alive with the equipment. At this point, the bodies are breaking down.
Wasn’t there a concern that the other unstable part would come crashing down on rescuers, expecially with heavy dozers and equipment vibrating at the base?
Exactly, what was still standing wasn’t stable. It was too dangerous to work there.
In my (not so humble) opinion they should have done the controlled demolition in the first week. I know it was a balancing act of risk vs. reward. Do they hold off to try and get people in the area they can reach safely, or do they risk killing those that might be trapped in the area they can’t safely go into.
However, the big names in the controlled demolition field are really, really good at what they do. I would have dropped that building on day 5. Usually they want elegant, neat and dropping into the basement/ foundation. This time they went for uneven and tilting away from the ruble pile. This video shows the demolition from a number of sides and you can see how they did it.
The flashing lights in the building may have been from mirrors reflecting lights.
I thought CDI did a great job and watching live I wondered about the flashes in the lower floors but upon reflection found them more likely to be glass/mirrors catching light as the building started to move, even before it came down. Later seeing multiple angles confirmed this.
Tough call on when, my bet is officials both likely know more than they’re telling, or told at the time, and there’s the sticky wicket of survival time and when to write off the site as survivable. I wouldn’t want to be the one making that decision. My instinct is that technology employed into the areas close to the standing building failed, even early on, to indicate possible survivors but they had to play it out.
Hellva day, using explosives on Independence Day to bring down a building where so many lost their lives. Kinda put a somber edge on an otherwise upbeat day for myself.
Now the story will disappear and likely only those directly affected will carry the burden forward. Such is how humans exist. Life, for the living, marches on.
Look a Governor DeSantis. Doing whatever he can, not getting in the way of other officials doing their jobs, no grandstanding.
That’s My Governor! I shudder to think what would be going on if Gillum had won.
He has been absolutely amazing throughout. A truly impressive person and leader.
God Bless. This has to be on of the more difficult tasks ever.
Heart breaking human tragedy. I know their family members are wrecks
God help them.
What dumb ass authorized demo charges to be used? That sucked any oxygen that survivors needed right away from them. Slim chance anyone was still alive but that stupid move was the death sentence for sure. Maybe some little kids survived, they have the mammalian diving reflex, the same thing happpens when kids fall through the ice. They should have set up sky cranes and began dismantling floor by floor. DUMB ASSES!
That wasn’t a realistic alternative. Start pulling on things in an already unstable structure and on a good day you just kill the crane crew. There’s no safe place to put the crane, to start with.
I would imagine the search and recovery teams were using the latest in thermal imaging technology, whether on drones or flying overhead and suspect if there had been any heat signatures, indicating people still alive, other options most likely would have been considered.
It has been 11 days. The human kidney starts taking irreversible damage after 3 days without water. Anyone still in the rubble was dead.
I’m sure that the rescue team would welcome the help of a good man.
Mike I don’t think you know how controlled demolitions work. They don’t use very much in the way of explosives… it’s in knowing where and how to place them. Most of the work is done by gravity. The top companies that do this are excellent at their work.
Since they wanted to have the standing structure fall away from the pile from the earlier collapse most of the charges would have been on the side of the building far away from were the original collapse was.
As they work down thru, I hope there are bldg inspectors to spot for aged materials that survive the demolition. Like aged/spaling cement, rusted rebar. I realize these could be between floors, but could indicate areas of long term deterioration, etc.
Cheap quality steel was used, not in line with building specifications. Someone will be in grave trouble, give it time.
No one will be held accountable. The company that built it is no longer around and its founder died some number of years ago from what I read.
I just hope that nobody suffered. I would rather that the dead went quickly.
Was talking to a friend who owned several dozen condos and managed several dozen buildings.
He described how the secondary collapse maybe happened.
He described the set up of some of these. The low areas like parking garages would have a more than normal length span from last support to the side of the adjacent tower to accommodate maybe a couple lanes of entry/exit traffic. This long beam was tied to the second tower kind of like a house deck tied to a house. But of course with more/stronger attachments/heavy duty bolts, etc.
He said most probably, the secondary collapse a few seconds after initial collapse happened when the first collapse pulled that long beam out of the second tower or damaged it severely. Pulling this support out, pulled the second tower in that direction.
We’ve all seen/heard about house deck collapse incidents. But of course those just tied to house with those brackets. Imagine if the decks could fall with such force and energy, they rip out support structures of the house. The house could conceivably fall toward the deck collapse.
Your descriotion sounds plausible and matches this animation:
All the equity these people had invested in their homes? Gone? Waiting for attorney’s and courts to figure out blame and damages?
SMH.
Another sad part will be that as association owners of the entire complex, families/estates of the deceased probably will be paying into a common fund for all families. It will be a pure mess.
Based on what I’ve read so far I don’t think the survivors will be paying anything. They need to get legal representation immediately. Everyone involved in this from the very beginning will have some sort of liability insurance and if this ain’t negligence I don’t know what is.
Pretty sure the first lawsuit was filed within 48hrs of the first collapse. I imagine many more will follow as the deaths are confirmed.
Horrible to think this could have easily been prevented.
Yes it could have been prevented and that is why a lot of people will be going out of business.
Praying for Surfside. I received a donation request from the Save America PAC – all proceeds designated for Surfside.
For a moment I thought it said “death toll is 27,115”! 27 is too much as it is.
Weren’t there 159 people missing? Presumably quite a few people turned out not to have been there.
As of this post, 27 confirmed dead, and 115 currently missing, which adds up to 142. So 17 were apparently otherwise accounted for since the first report.
Owned a couple of Condos in a complex that’s ~50′ from a riverbank with the parking garage on the bottom floor and I could see areas around the support beams that settled a couple of inches. Brought up the idea of having a structural integrity inspection and the HOA board, I was on it, wanted nothing to do with it and I got the impression to not ever bring it up or mention it to the other owners. It was built in 1985 with only 4 stories and is still standing. Sold both my units in ’17.
Owners of those collapsed Surfside condos don’t really have much recourse as it is/was their building to maintain. The original builders are long gone and/or dead.
Horrible. This should never happen in America.
Ex Navy Seal, Michael Jaco thinks it’s very likely that Surf Side Condos were intentially taken down by Deep State using Direct Energy Weapons.
Apparently manufacturing catastrophes is common tactic used by Deep State. It gains them access/more control (via the Feds) to certain states/jurisdictions. The condo collapse created opportunity for corrupt Surfside Mayor & Deep State Feds to create false narrative that older condo buildings in Surfside & in other parts of Florida could be subject to similar disasters. Gov officials in FL have already began evacuating properties under the guise of public safety. Creating fear & chaos in a community makes it easier to manipulate & control the masses. It’s easy for government officials to falsify documents stating that Surf Side Condo has a history of structural defects.
Ahh yes. I’ve been waiting patiently for the President of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade to pull up a chair.
Kinda makes sense, if true, that this would be done in FL. The DS is trying to get DeSantis on the ropes, and this would support that objective.
We have people sending their own rockets and space ships into space.
We are too smart to be building/living/owning high rises on wet sand.
Seems like more a matter of when, not if, no?
Governments, for tax revenue, will sacrifice common sense and allow this to happen.
I have read where another high rise was closed for similar structural issues.
If any good comes from this it might just be no more high rises in wet sand.
Not just tax revenue. People WANT to live there. And they DON’T want to hear about long term risks or how much they need to pay to fix them when they start to develop.
And they are almost always small risks. Maybe 1 in 100 causes a structural failure of some sort. Of those 1 in 100 requires a fair amount of work to fix while the other 99 can be tolerated. Of those it’s another 1 in 100 that makes a building dangerous. This is why we have building codes. It’s the only way to protect against the inevitable when too many people are willing to take the small risks and ignore the possibilities of disaster.
The condo company ALMOST dodged this one. They hire an architectural engineering firm, the firm did the inspection, the analysis, proposed a plan and were working on the repairs at the time the building collapsed. It isn’t clear whether the firm put enough emphasis on how dangerous the situation was. It also isn’t clear there weren’t delays because of COVID issues even though in theory construction was part of critical infrastructure. Last but not least, it also isn’t clear the condo association was sufficiently concerned about the safety of the people in the condos.
Another hard truth of life is that failures like this one are rarely the result of one really, really bad decision. They are almost always the result of a long chain of potentially bad decisions, no one of which was sufficient to cause the catastrophe and usually had almost any one of them been a good decision the event would not have happened.
It is unfortunately almost certain that those people were instantly reduced to pancakes.
Of equal or greater concern is something that has to do with “building your house upon the sand.” Florida, more or less, “is one gigantic sand-bar.” There are thousands of high-rise buildings that were built – literally – “on the beach.”
I choose to presume that Surfside was competently and not negligently constructed. But fatal foundation flaws developed. Well then, where else did they “develop,” both in this neighborhood and everywhere else?
JULY 05, 2021
A Few Things About Reinforced Concrete High-Rise Condos
There is a downside to steel reinforcing bars: they rust.
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-few-things-about-reinforced-concrete.html
Excellent footage of the site from all sides in the first few days, and everything going on around it.
Footage of the building before.