Florida building collapse: ‘Major structural damage’ was alerted in 2018

An engineer, who consulted on the Miami-area residential building which collapsed early Thursday, had said in 2018 that the building has ‘major structural damage’. He had also said that a repair project for the structure was scheduled to begin soon.

A 2018 structural report that was released late Friday night was done ‘as required by’ the Miami-Dade County Code, which says that 40-year-old structures like the Champlain Towers South condominium complex undergo a recertification process.

Frank Morabito, the engineering consultant, found “abundant cracking and spalling of varying degrees” in the “concrete columns, beams, and walls” of the ground floor parking garage. 

The report also included photos of cracks in the columns and “spalling,” or concrete tumbling, that had exposed steel reinforcements on the garage deck.

“Though some of this damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion,” Morabito wrote in the October 2018 report.

According to the NYT, recertification for buildings started after a building collapse in Miami in 1974.

There was another study that was led by Florida International University’s Shimon Wdowinski which found signs of land subsidence at the site between 1993 and 1999.

“I don’t know if the collapse was predictable. But we did detect that the building moved in the 1990s,” AFP quoted the environment professor said on CNN.

“It’s very subtle. It’s two millimeters per year but it’s still detected by the satellites,” he explained, describing what was happening as a “slow process” of settling, rather than sinking.

“In this case, it’s a very localized signal of that building,” he said.

“And it means that it’s not necessarily the building moved into the ground. It can be that the building moved within itself — if there were some kind of structural damage within the building.”

As of now, 4 people were confirmed dead and 159 unaccounted for as rescue teams scoured a mountain of rubble in a desperate search for survivors.