Condo owners must collaborate, spend to make sure buildings are up to code
At least 10 people are dead and more than 150 unaccounted for after a high-rise residential building in Surfside, Fla., collapsed last Thursday.
Roberto Leon, a professor of structural engineering at Virginia Tech says the disaster is a wakeup call that guidelines need to change.
The incident, while rare, is not totally unheard of, especially for high rises near salt water, he said.
“I don’t want to alarm people, but, I would say this is a call to arms. Owners of buildings are to be inspecting them and doing repairs as needed,” Leon said.
Leon points to an engineer's report from 2018 that shows “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below the pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage under the 13-story building.
“Based on the report, I don’t think the engineer felt that there was any chance of an imminent collapse,” Leon said.
Leon says the vast majority of buildings privately built and maintained, which makes implementing government-set guidelines difficult and expensive.
“Sometimes these buildings are owned by condo associations and so on, not by a single person and reaching that agreement among all of these owners that you need to do this inspection and repair is not something that usually would be done,” Leon said.
According to the New York Times, the Champlain Towers South management committee had plans for a multimillion-dollar repair project that came too late.
Leon says the incident could spark new guidelines at a national level when it comes to inspections and repairs. He also says high rise buildings built before the year 2000 should be inspected, “particularly, owners in areas where you might have additional corrosion because of the sea salts and things like that.
“It's certainly an area of concern. Codes keep improving, and we keep changing. The building in Miami would not have been constructed the same way today. We have learned a lot in those years," he said.
Leon says it’s way too early to determine a cause for the collapse. It could be months, possibly over a year, before inspectors know what exactly caused the building to collapse.
