Has terrorism been ruled out?
Guy
Only if the inspection happened before this horrible accident…
Still difficult to know how many people were inside.
Very few bodies pulled out so far.
Some updates:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article252414378.html
TWO DAYS BEFORE CONDO COLLAPSE, A POOL CONTRACTOR PHOTOGRAPHED THIS DAMAGE IN GARAGE
4:50p.m.: There was nothing unusual about the lobby and pool area at Champlain Towers South Condo, which looked clean and well maintained to a commercial pool contractor who visited the building last Tuesday, just 36 hours before half of the building unexpectedly collapsed. Then, he saw the basement-level garage.
“There was standing water all over the parking garage,” the contractor, who asked not to be named, told the Miami Herald. He noted cracking concrete and severely corroded rebar under the pool.
He also took photos, which he shared with the Herald.
I’m from Miami and just moved from there. My father is also a home inspector in S Florida. It would have passed recertification. 
The whole business is shady. That’s putting it lightly. So sad.
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Why would a terrorist attack a random, low-rent condominium in South Florida? This isn’t exactly the WTC. The cause is what we often criticize Taiwan for after a deadly earthquake.… shoddy construction and ignored safety violations. The only bad guys are the negligent construction company or engineers. One side of the building had been slowly sinking into the ground for about 20 years.
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So I guess this means “yes.”
Guy
It was never even brought up as a possibility. I was explaining why.
It’s just Florida, man. Nothing to see here.
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Ouch!
Guy
I don’t think I’ve seen it noted in this thread that residents were warned as late as April this year and possible as long ago as 2018 of danger signs. They were told at a condo building meeting that everything was fine though.
" A letter sent in April to residents of the Miami Beach-area condo that collapsed last week said the building’s “concrete deterioration is accelerating” and warned that damage “would begin to multiply exponentially.”
This whole thing is a nightmare horror. Families keeping vigils outside the building now praying for a miracle loved ones will be pulled out.
I was always told as akid and teen by adults that young people never think “it” can happen to them.
"It"can, and adults also justify things the same as kids. Perhaps a culture shift towards people speaking the truth should gravitate away from ostricizing them and shitting all over their realistic points.
Once again many people due to greed, laziness, ignirance and avoidance. So sad when things seem so preventable.
Wonder how people people a day say “If only we had listened”.
One news outlet reported the residents were told it would take 15 million USD to asses the situation.
Imagine the cost of fixing.
Have a look at the pictures in my previous link. Hard to imagine people willingly lived like that…unless they had nowhere to go and no legal recourse to sue those responsible and have enough to fix that hellhole or move out.
So far, has anyone heard of the construction company?
15 million to just asses?? Seems corruption is doing quite well for itself in these hard times. Holy shyte batman.
Meanwhile at the morality auction:
I have 15 million, can i hear a 15.5?
15 five, 15, 5
Sold to the contractor for 30 million and a shutthefuckup now!
The only thing I’ve heard is that it is the same company that built the adjoining building which, of course, is getting looked at seriously. Much will come out in the investigations but it is a 40 year old building so who knows who is still around who was involved in the construction.
Yes, it was estimated at $15M to do repairs and it led to infighting on the condo board and people resigning. This too will be investigated, no doubt.
Sadly, they have had to suspend rescue and recovery operations for now as what still stands of the building is looking dangerously possible to collapse further. So sad.
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It wasn’t low-rent; some of those units were paying US$9000 per month for their condo fee assessments, and a few units had sold in the first half of this year for prices as high as US$3,800,000.
Normalcy bias.
It’s not that “they had nowhere to go”. These condominiums were quite valuable. Most people who owned one could easily have sold it to afford a much larger, nicer house somewhere inland. People just didn’t expect this type of catastrophic failure to happen.
Condominium contractors often form separate LLCs for each project, then dissolve after the project has been fully turned over to an owner-run board. No LLC any more means no one available to sue when major structural flaws are later found.
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No, $15M was the estimated cost of doing the repairs. They’d already done the evaluation, repeatedly.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/04/us/documents-construction-miami-building-collapse/index.html
The language used to describe the structural problems in the 40-year-old building has varied since an engineer brought in by the condominium board first reviewed the tower in 2018.
In a report that year, the engineer, Frank Morabito, wrote that “failed waterproofing” below the pool deck and the entrance drive was “causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas” and warned that failure to replace it in the near future would cause “concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.”
By April 2021, the president of the condominium’s board, Jean Wodnicki, was warning that “the concrete deterioration is accelerating.”
“The observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial [2018] inspection,” Wodnicki wrote in a letter to building residents.
Infighting among the board members over the repairs, which had jumped in price from an estimated $9 million to $15 million by 2021, had led in part to the resignation the majority of the condominium’s board by the fall of 2019, The Washington Post reported.
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Another one in USA, in old New York