So, early on in this tragedy you might’ve heard some engineers express reservations about the design of this building and how the related building (Champlain North) wasn’t at risk. The implication was there was something different about the design that made this one a problem, but not the other one.
You might recall me mentioning that the design drawings published by the city of Surfside were a bit of a mess, mainly they were in no particular order. But they were also some revised sheets that were dated about six months after the first set.
The most obvious change was to the pile design but there was another change to the elevation of the pool deck, in relation to the parking deck. As part of that change, some beams were omitted whose main function was to deal with the change in elevation that was originally proposed between the two areas but that also had a secondary purpose, that of carrying loads between columns for things like the planters.
This video analyzes all of that and the guy has done some calculations that indicate that the engineer wasn’t conservative enough on some of his loadings. Somethings were marginal on day one and possibly quite a bit less than marginal after years of deterioration in the concrete and the steel. I don’t want to oversimplify this but I think this guy is on the right track in terms of identifying the main factors that triggered the collapse.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WaZcyq7YsNA
Obviously, further analysis needs to be done and will be done, but it’s not looking good right now for the design of this particular building.
There are things in the video that this guy mentioned in passing, but doesn’t really drill down on and some of those I find pretty bothersome.
And all of that assumes that the building was built the way it was drawn, which is often not the case.