A Month After the Surfside Building Collapse—Have We Learned Nothing?

The tragic collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Fla. a little after 1:20 a.m. on Thursday, June 24, 2021, is still a searing memory a month later. It was the worst non-terrorist building collapse in U.S. history. Most of the 159 residents who were asleep in their condominiums were crushed to death as 12 floors fell, one after the other, in quick succession. One part of the building stayed intact and the residents who lived there, hearing the roar and feeling the shock, rushed out into hallways to find a gaping chasm where once were their elevators. For over a week, relatives maintained a vigil, awaiting news of their loved ones as rescue teams and their dogs searched for survivors. There were none. A pancake failure leaves no survivable space.

The collapse was a surprise in every sense of the word. No one saw it coming. Not the residents. Not the condo association. Not the city of Surfside, which had thought itself prudent in limiting the height of beachfront buildings to 12 stories. Not the city of Miami Beach located to the South, which imposed no such limits on its part of the barrier island. Not any resident, builder, construction firm or engineers hired to pass the plans for multistory, seaside residential buildings.

The scale and devastation, the lives lost and the dreams dashed has indeed called into question the age of buildings on beachfronts, the length of intervals between inspections—and the business model of condominiums, which shifts the responsibility of building maintenance from the building’s owner to building’s residents.

Shockwaves from the Surfside building collapse—unprecedented as it was in both place and scale—seem to be confined to condominium buildings in Miami Beach. Because that was what Champlain Towers South was. Outside this limited circle of risk, the business of building and selling buildings on the coast has reverted to business as usual, and the Florida coast is hot. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that 22 homes sold for $40 million in Palm Beach, another barrier island located 55 miles North of Surfside.  COVID started.

We had ignored all the signs of impending disaster, with our codes written for our protection—and our common sense. As seawater erodes all our building materials—wood, brick, concrete and steel, so too did we erode our natural aversion to building in harm’s way or on precarious footing, allowing buildings that were too heavy on land to be built on a surface that was no more than shifting sand. We fortified buildings to withstand recent disasters (hurricanes), but we didn’t prepare them for the next one (sea level rise). We let business pressures cloud our judgment and force our hand—the hand that stamps approval on building plans—on every building plan thrust before us. We had faith in our calculations, on piles stuck deep into the sand, on beams with reinforcing steel tendons staying strong. We had lots of proof that all this worked, that we had done it right—pointing to all the buildings still standing as evidence. So, buildings got taller and were built where none had been built before. Sites previously dismissed because they were too sloped, too soft, where there were floods or quakes could hold up heavy buildings. We got cocky, overcome by our ingenuity and our problem-solving. This was America, and by God, we were going to build on it.

“Buildings like this don’t fall down in America,” said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett that fateful day on June 21 on CBS Evening News as he struggled to understand what had happened to the first of Surfside’s maximum height (12 story) residential buildings, most of which was reduced to a 16-foot-high pile of rubble.

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 
(Matthew 7:24-27, New International Version)

That buildings weigh a lot goes without saying. It concerns only the construction crew who must haul the building material into the air from piles on the ground—and, for a project the size of the Champlain Towers South, one or two civil engineers. The engineers will perform their canned calculations on the structural beams and columns, guaranteeing that the aforementioned building material stays in the air, along with residents and their pets, furnishings, elevators, automobiles and everything else that occupies a lived-in multifamily residential building. Additional structural and civil engineers will be employed in more challenging and innovative projects. For example, Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands Hotel, built on soft soil in 2010, balances an infinity pool on top of three 57-story-tall, almost imperceptibly swaying towers. By comparison, the Champlain Tower South building, built in 1981, presented far less of a challenge.

But let’s not blame the engineers. Engineers are trained to solve problems, including the problems presented by overly ambitious developers, who press against the engineers’ initial wariness and protests. Thoughts of “you can’t build this” or “you can’t build there” or “the last time someone built there it was a disaster” find no voice. Instead, there is sublimating into the challenge of solving an unsolved problem, of building something new—something wonderful, something that future generations will admire. The period of design and build comes with its share of sweaty palms and sleepless nights, but afterward—immediately or after some test of time, with the structure still standing—it is time to enshrine the engineer who has conquered the impossible, bridged the widest chasm, designed the tallest skyscraper or the widest dam.

The Champlain Towers South building was the first of the tall condominium buildings in Surfside, rising up in 1981 to meet the newly minted 12-story limit thought safe by the then sleepy town of Surfside, located just north of the wild, fashionable Miami Beach, which already had sprouted enough tall buildings on the sand to look like a picket fence against the Atlantic Ocean. The condo boom reached a fever pitch in Florida in the 1970s and there were still fortunes to be made in creating housing for those whose dream was to live on the beach, watching sunrises over the Atlantic and still live the urban life.

Condo development, in buildings that were getting taller, bigger and heavier, pushed engineers into a corner. They could do all the calculations they wanted, call for all the structure strength they needed, but at the end of the day, they had to stamp the drawings. They assured themselves with similarity and example. Most of what was built was still standing, right? Yeah, it was located on the beach, but we have thick, reinforced concrete pads that rest on piles. Deep piles. How could piles be supportive enough if they don’t reach rock? That’s like sticking pins in cheese, say the uninformed. Trust us, we are engineers. We have perfected piles. We can pour concrete piles that stick better in soil. We can drill piles into soil and sand with giant auger bits. The problem has been solved. We knew how to build on anything, even sand.

The engineers who certified the building plans for Champlain Towers South no doubt felt they would be safer than their Miami Beach counterparts. Miami Beach has been building much taller towers on the same sand. In fact, just over the Surfside-Miami Beach border is Eighty Seven Park, an 18-story condominium high-rise. Completed in 2020, the luxury condominium, with floor-to-ceiling windows and wraparound glass decks, offers residents an obstructed view of the sunrises over the ocean—and just to the North, the ruins of Champlain Towers South. A 2011 list of the tallest buildings on Miami Beach reveals 14 residential buildings over 30 stories tall. All of them have been eclipsed by Five Park. At 55 stories, with floor-to-ceiling windows and wraparound glass decks, Five Park is more than two Eighty Seven Parks, one on top of the other. Prices start at $2.5 million and units started going on sale June before the Champlain Towers South collapse.

In our search for answers to the Surfside collapse, we admit we have flown right over the basic question of the stability of the Earth on which rests all that we build. Let’s address that question right now, although succinctly, as the magnitude of the subject is vast, dwarfing civil engineering projects both in scale and time. Geologists, the rightful owners of this subject, who are mindful of masses measured in thousands of miles and time in eons, have long known and been keenly aware of the basic fragility of the Earth’s crust—while the rest of us refer to it as terra firma or “rock solid.”

We count on Earth’s crust to support its oceans and continents … to the tiny structures that we build like super industrious ants. We are reminded that the Earth’s crust is as thin as the skin of an apple but that the skin of an apple is continuous and Earth’s crust is more like pieces of the skin floating on top of a molten core.

Civil engineers are forced to reckon with Earth’s dynamic crust when pieces of it rub against each other causing earthquakes and our structures to fall, but that concerns mostly the edges of tectonic plates and over known fault systems. In the industrialized world, we have attempted to address at-risk areas with seismic retrofits of structures and tightened building restrictions.

While acknowledging no area is free of earthquakes, a report by the Florida Geological Survey declared the state free of any earthquakes of significance, past and future—deflecting attention to less fortunate California. Indeed, the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco remains to this day the single most destructive earthquake for any major city in modern history. The earthquake may have briefly delayed the state’s meteoric population growth propelled in large part by the 1849 Gold Rush but from the ruined city was borne the scientific study of seismic phenomenon. California remains the leader in earthquake readiness with the strictest building codes in the U.S. To get a PE (professional engineer) license in California, one must pass an added exam on seismic principles. But the seismic and geological study has also made us more aware of faults elsewhere. For example, Massachusetts, with its last big quake in 1755, instituted seismic building codes in 2011.

Despite a seeming lack of concern for shaky ground, the Florida does operate seismographs and on June 21, just three days before the condo collapse, the seismographs registered a 3.9 magnitude tremor. The shock came from an underwater explosion by the U.S. Navy, which set off 40,000 pounds of explosives to test the battle readiness of the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier. The blast received scant notice at the time but has received more attention as the media seeks to find causes for the building collapse.

Could the blast have brought down the Champlain Towers South building, already teetering from creeping structural damage? Several experts questioned by the Miami Herald say a sound building should easily withstand such minor tremors. “California has those quite often,” said Paul Earle, a Colorado-based seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center.

The Surfside condominium building collapsed suddenly. Although the exact mechanism for structural failure remains a matter of speculation, there is no doubt that the top of the building was sinking. A study of satellite data revealed that Champlain Towers South was sinking at a rate of 2 millimeters per year. Nearby buildings showed no sinking. A possible and yet unconfirmed cause of the collapse: a lowering of structural columns, which were perhaps sinking into the concrete slabs. Some photographic evidence of such sinking has come to light. The columns themselves may also have been compressing. There was plenty of salt in the air and in the ocean—the arch enemy of both concrete and steel. Sea water would invade the condominium’s basement parking facility frequently, leaving standing water. A building maintenance person mentioned the problem of standing water in the garage to the building’s owners and was told to keep the pumps running, reported CBS Local News. The pumps ran so often that they would burn out. Sea water was not the only water entering the subgrade level. The pool, located one level above, was leaking and a protective membrane had given way, allowing chlorinated water to enter. Cars parked in the garage reportedly used to float into each other.

The subsidence report, perhaps the earliest warning of a building’s imminent collapse, was not acted on. Researcher Shimon Wdowinski, interviewed shortly after the building collapse, said that in an earlier satellite study that detected sinkholes in Central Western Florida—when subsidence was found—they checked the buildings for cracks. But there is no evidence that anyone checked for cracks at Champlain Towers South based on the 2020 study. The subsidence of the Champlain Towers area was noted only by its location, not by its name, as a “condominium that was 12 stories high,” and an anomaly in the otherwise stable Eastern side of Miami Beach island. In all fairness to Wdowinski and his fellow researchers, the 2020 report was commissioned to find large-scale subsidence of the urban areas of Miami Beach and Norfolk, Va. because of coastal flooding. Cracking and sinking columns and other structural damage of a too-tall condo building was not at all the study’s purpose. Nor were Surfside officials or Champlain Towers South’s condo board the report’s audience, and it is also very likely that they had never heard of it.

For months, the Champlain Towers South residents and their building had been rattled by construction of the Eighty Seven Park building next door.

“We are concerned that the construction next to Surfside is too close,” said Mara Chouela, a board member of the Champlain Towers South condo association, in a January 2019 email to a building official in her Florida town. Workers were “digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building.”

Eliana Salzhauer, a Surfside town commissioner, said she had heard from residents who said that the building “was shaking all the time” during the construction. “They were very traumatized and shook up,” she said.

Construction of Eighty Seven Park would generate more than 50 complaints between 2016 and 2019, leading to fines for excessive noise at least eight times, according to city records.

The developers eventually offered the Champlain Towers South condo board a $400,000 settlement, according to the Washington Post. The offer not only asked residents to stop complaining but also to write letters in support of the project to officials of both Surfside and Miami Beach, after which they would receive half of the settlement, with the rest to follow after the building was occupied, and on the condition that they wouldn’t publicly disclose the arrangement.

8701 Collins Development LLC, set up by Terra Group and its partners to develop Eighty Seven Park, has officially denied responsibility, stating that it is “confident that the construction of 87 Park did not cause or contribute to the collapse that took place in Surfside.”

Could the water and salt have weakened the concrete of the foundation slab that had been giving way to the weight of the building, with months of heavy loud construction next door turning columns into jackhammers?

Buildings in Miami-Dade County, Surfside and other Florida seaside communities adopted a law to recertify buildings 40 years after their construction following the collapse of a federal building (housing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA) in downtown Miami in 1974. The building suffered a pancake collapse 49 years after it was built. The 40-year inspection rule is credited to John Pistorino, then a civil engineer just entering practice.

But a similar collapse of the Champlain Towers South almost exactly 40 years after its construction calls into question whether 40 years provides enough of a margin of safety. Why not recertify after 25 years, or 10 years, with each introducing a far greater margin of safety?

The Surfside collapse has made for a feverish rush to study the age of every building in Miami Beach Island. Many were built during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, the boom time for condominiums. Normal reservations about building on barrier islands—sometimes little more than shifting, mostly submerged dunes of sand—went out the window. The condo gold rush was on. Everyone wanted to live on the beach. Any civil engineer, slide rule in the pocket and quoting the Bible, “thou shalt not build your houses on sand,” was no match for the onrushing tide of development.

But over the years, Miami Beach developed some of the strictest building codes in the country. After Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida in the early 1990s and tore up quite a few buildings and trees and sent cars flying, buildings were mandated to be able to survive the onslaught of future hurricanes.

But Miami, Miami Beach and Florida all have a long history and an established reputation of real estate and construction swindles. Our grandfathers joked that buying land in Florida was as good a deal as getting a share of the Brooklyn Bridge. Construction firms are known for bidding low to get the job then trying to eke out a profit by cutting back on materials or taking shortcuts.

Concrete, literally the building block of construction, has been used successfully since Ancient Rome. Without so much as a degreed engineer (the first engineering degree is said to have been awarded by the U.S. Military Academy, better known as West Point, in 1817) or the use of reinforcing steel. Romans succeeded in using concrete magnificently, from building the giant domed roof of the Pantheon to inventing a marine concrete, called the “most durable building material in human history,” by Philip Brune, a research scientist and engineer at DuPont Pioneer.

Modern day concrete can vary greatly in its ingredients as well as in its application. The binding material in concrete is cement. Cement plants employ a complex, energy-intensive process of making cement in hot, loud production facilities, varying ingredients to achieve a desired purpose, using available materials and multiple sources and altering the process accordingly. Each step of its manufacture introduces a variability. In the better run plants, testing and sampling is constant and assures quality standards.

Worldwide, the manufacture of concrete can be an altogether different story. Research into the concrete produced in Bangladesh, for example, found that none of the 28-day samples tested for compressive strength passed due to “poor quality control, governmental corruption, and problems associated with transportation and storage.”

The 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh killed 1,134 textile workers and injured 2,500, making it the most horrific non-terrorist building collapse in the modern world. As is typical in building structural failure, the failure was due to multiple causes—the building was built on top of a filled pond, extra stories were added (three extra stories) and substandard concrete was used in its construction.

In Before the Collapse: A Guide to the Other Side of Growth, the author speculates about how the builders of Rana Plaza “could have saved money by reducing the amount of steel reinforcement for the concrete. Or maybe they had used poor quality sand; a typical trick to save money is to use sand from some beach. This sand is contaminated with sea salt and that favors the corrosion of the [steel].”

The concrete that is poured on the site may vary from what is specified in the design and material. Slabs may not be as thick as specified (this will be a key finding of an upcoming forensic report). Rebar may not be as numerous. 

Indeed, a picture of the rubble from the Surfside condo collapse suggests that less rebar was used for the concrete slab floors than was called for in the building plans.

“There does not appear to be enough steel connecting the slab to the columns,” said R. Shankar Nair, member of the National Academy of Engineering and former chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, who was interviewed by the New York Times. “What we see out there seems inconsistent with what the drawings show.” The design called for running four steel bars through the slab in each direction, but the photos appear to show fewer than that.

The crew pouring the cement can keep the concrete from setting while they are waiting for the pour by adding sugar. That’s right, sucrose—ordinary table sugar. Sugar acts like a retardant and a certain amount of sugar (0.06 %), a component of sucrose—ordinary table sugar—will retard initial setting time by 1 hour and 20 minutes, which can make all the difference in a hot climate. Like in Miami. Although we hasten to add, there has been no evidence or testimony of the concrete used during construction of the Champlain Towers South building being too sweet.

Sand is one of the main components of concrete. Sand can be gathered from beaches and not washed to save money. The salt that remains in the sand will corrode the structural steel used to reinforce the concrete. The connection between unwashed sea sand in the concrete of the Champlain Towers South building has not been definitively established, but Jeff Goodall, author of The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World, tells of his travels through South Florida and of “concrete used in the much beloved Art Deco buildings of South Beach often mixed with salt water or salty beach sand, which can cause the rebar within the concrete to corrode over time and greatly weaken the concrete.” In the company of an architect, he found structural walls so weak that they could be knocked down with a hammer. He wonders how many other buildings were built this way. He asks an electrical engineer and lighting designer who worked in Miami Beach during the 1950s and 1960s (Champlain Towers South was built in 1981) about building codes that would surely have been violated, prompting only a laugh. “There was no code! Or if there was, nobody paid any attention to it,” said the electrical engineer.

Eagle-eyed structural engineers on the Eng-Tips forum have drawn attention to the lack of adhesion of concrete to the reinforcing steel. Weird that no “concrete is stuck onto rebar” when it is usually “all over the place, even when it basically falls down from the slab.” 

The construction of reinforced beams and columns counts on the rebar adhering to the concrete. An epoxy coating is applied, but unlike epoxy’s use as glue, the epoxy on the rebar functions to protect it against corrosion from exposure to water. Pull-out is also assured mechanically by ridges on the rebar. Rebar that is yanked out of concrete cleanly is said to have unzipped.

Water, as noted previously, was in plentiful supply at the condo building when it should have been absent. The condominium’s basement garage filled with water from frequent rising seawater flooding it and leaking from the building’s pool. In a 2018 report “Fatigue Pull-Out Failure of Deformed Bars in Concrete Under the Effect of Liquid Water,” researchers found that cement in the vicinity of the rebar “turned into sludge from a complex interaction of liquid water and fatigue” and a pull-out failure occurred even at a “comparatively low load level.”

Shoddy construction of the time could be caught by what is known as a threshold inspection performed by the city and independent engineers, but such inspections were not required during the condo gold rush.

But inspection results are not what condo owners or condo boards want to hear about—unless they show no problems. Miami Beach condo buildings have had a history of inspections that have uncovered structural flaws. To say that such reports are not received well may the understatement of the seaside development era.

The poor civil engineer, hired to find problems and offer corrective solutions, is met with open hostility. “I got cursed at and thrown out of meetings,” said one civil engineer.

Exposed after the Champlain Towers South building collapse is the fundamental problem with condominium buildings—the ambiguity of responsibility that comes with ownership.

Developers are quick to unload themselves from ownership of a condo building, thereby ensuring the quickest possible return on their investment. By contrast, it can take 20 to 30 years to break even on a rental property.

Ownership is transferred to a condo board that is composed of volunteers elected by residents. Rarely do board members have building management experience or civil engineering degrees, yet they have the ultimate right and responsibility of managing, maintaining and repairing the building. The condo board exacts a monthly fee meant to keep the pool clean, the lawns mowed, the electric bulbs changed in the common areas, among other things. Almost always, the monthly fees are seen by residents as the limits of what they will pay, having paid as much as they can up front for what is essentially a volume of air above the ground. Residents expect the monthly fees to remain constant and that what is not spent to collect in the treasury for the unexpected. Never would there have been enough in the treasury to cover major structural repairs such as those that were called for by Frank Morabito, PE, who in 2018 examined the building and suggested repairs necessary for its 40-year recertification. Here was a staggering estimate that was to balloon to $15 million and was to be passed on to the residents as a “special assessment” of $100,000. It was enough to reduce some tenants to tears and others to rage. No one saw this coming. Everyone had bought into a life on the beach with a Surfside condo, which unlike the high-priced condos in the glitzy and glamorous Miami Beach, still offered a relatively good deal.

Had the residents been in rental unit, the building owner would have been responsible for the repairs.