As of this writing, it has been more than three years since the collapse of the Champlain Towers condominium building in Surfside, Florida on June 24, 2021. 98 people died.
The investigation is ongoing. There are now thousands of pages of research and discussions on the collapse, but the essential factors that contributed to it seem to be:
- Construction that violated building codes and engineering guidelines.
- The condominium association kept deferring maintenance due to cost concerns. There are debates about how aware they were of the serious issues in the building.
The collapse and deaths had massive rippling effects. Condominium regulations in Florida and across the country got much tighter. Now condominiums have to have significant maintenance reserves.
The tragedy is an example of how we live in a world of physical limits where our personal desires and financial situations do not always match physical reality. Physics don’t negotiate, as brutal as it sounds.
Physical structures like buildings, roads, and water pipes naturally deteriorate due to the weather, water, wind, continued use, etc. To keep them in usable and more importantly, safe conditions, you need to regularly maintain them. The maintenance costs include actual physical materials, energy, and human labor, not just money. The actual costs to get a structure to a certain safe level is not tied to how much money we have. We might have enough money and all other resources needed to repair it. Or we might not. Again, physics don’t negotiate, and they don’t care about your financial situations.
If it turns out that the owners of a structure – public or private – do not have enough resources to get a dangerous structure to a safe level, it then brings up the very difficult question of demolishing it or leaving it blocked off for the future when there are enough resources.
To maintain, demolish, or defer? That is the question.
Further Reading
- Because deferred maintenance is such a common issue among people struggling financially, many municipalities offer home rehabilitation programs for those who qualify. Some municipalities have their own rehabilitation departments. Others contract it out to other organizations, typically nonprofits. You can contact your local government, typically the community development office or the planning office, to get information about local programs. The federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) department gives out home rehabilitation funding to municipal governments. Here is HUD’s list, which seems to have some mistakes and omissions: https://www.hud.gov/states/massachusetts/homeownership/homerepairs.
- The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a website that covers the technical aspects of the collapse without going into the legalities or social aspects: https://www.nist.gov/disaster-failure-studies/champlain-towers-south
- A commercial blog article talks about the collapse, going into the social details and the need for better financial controls. Its “Why did the Surfside collapse occur?” section shows how messy these maintenance disputes can become: https://www.condocontrol.com/blog/surfside-tragedy-underscores-need-for-preventive-condo-maintenance/