Miami Herald: Collapsed Florida Residential Building Had Major Defects, Violated Code

Sarah Blaskey, Aaron Leibowitz, and Bern Cornack report the bombshell findings of a new study into the building conditions that caused the collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida in July.

Champlain Towers South was poorly designed, even for the 1970s when the plans were originally drawn and codes were less rigorous, according to an analysis of building plans, applicable building codes and photos of the debris performed by the Miami Herald in consultation with four engineers and a general contractor.

Most of the column designs were too narrow to safely accommodate the amount of reinforcing steel called for in the plans at the basement and ground floors, especially at the critical areas where the columns connected to the slab, engineers’ calculations based on the building code requirements at the time show.

The column-to-slab connection would have been stronger if the building had been constructed to code, and the narrow columns were built to allow more space for parking, according to the experts consulted by the Herald.

The deck — which sat on skinny columns to maximize parking space below — was barely designed with enough strength to support a pool party, much less the layers of pavers and standing water that loaded it down over the decades, calculations by engineers using figures from the 1970s show.

The article includes more detail on the construction deficiencies and failures to build to code discovered in the analysis. Some of the findings of the report, especially regarding the column-to-slab connection, echo the findings of earlier photo analysis by The New York Times.