![]() Multiple palm trees and planters not in the 1979 plans were added to the slab, archived photographs show. The columns held up more steel-reinforced concrete slabs, which made up the building’s floors.Ĭoncrete in the pool deck was repaired at least four times between 19, according to town records. Rows of concrete columns ran vertically to the roof from the foundations beneath the garage. Separately, a single-level basement parking garage - accessed by a ramp on the building’s north side - was built into a 10½-foot-deep hole beneath the slab, so the slab was the garage’s ceiling. To the west of the pool deck, on the same concrete slab, was a driveway and a parking area. ![]() Raised concrete planter boxes were installed in various locations around the complex, including at the northern edge of the pool deck, near to where it joined the building. Almost five inches of additional layers including concrete, waterproofing and pavings sat between the slab and the surface that residents walked on, according to a 2020 engineer’s report. The pool deck was laid on the southeastern quadrant of that base slab, with a pool and Jacuzzi in one corner. A grid of steel reinforcing bars, known as rebar, ran through the slab to boost its strength and stability. The troubled slabĬhamplain Towers South, which contained 136 apartments, was built on a concrete slab about 9½-inches thick that spanned about 55,000 square feet. The president of the condo association board and the board’s attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article. Mosalam, the director of Berkeley’s Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center and a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, stressed that his simulation depicted a “possible sequence of events” and that it does not provide “the definite answer we all are looking for.” ![]() Joe DiPompeo, the president of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that both theories put forward by the engineers are “plausible” accounts of how a failure in the deck could have led to the building collapse.ĭiPompeo and other engineers cautioned that nothing will be conclusive until investigators finish analyzing the wreckage, which has been removed for examination. The Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Miami-Dade Police Department are also investigating the disaster. “We’re looking at every possibility,” said Kilsheimer, who added that investigators are “researching 20 or 30 things” that could have caused the initial deck collapse. Kilsheimer, a longtime engineer leading an investigation of the collapse for Surfside, told The Post that he is looking at several potential collapse sequences resulting from the pool deck failure, including the ones engineers proposed to The Post. Investigations of the disaster, which killed 98 people, are advancing on multiple fronts and are expected to take many months.Īllyn E. Some suggested that a yet-to-be-discovered problem in the parking garage - or even deeper underground - could have brought down the pool deck and possibly the building. Some engineers pointed to water corrosion-related issues identified there in 2018, but others said such damage alone was unlikely to have caused the collapse. The cause of that failure remains unknown. In this sequence, the deck remained attached to the columns even as it collapsed, tugging or twisting them and the surrounding beams until the columns fell.īoth theories are consistent with a growing number of witness accounts that the pool deck collapsed first. Other engineers outlined a second possible scenario involving a less extensive collapse of the pool deck. Mosalam’s team created its 3-D model and simulation for The Post. Mosalam, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, found that an initial deck collapse that extended beyond those key columns, where the deck joined the building’s facade, could have overloaded the columns and caused them to buckle. ![]() ![]() Using the simulation, a team led by Khalid M. The review identifies possible sequences of events where the collapse of the pool deck into an underground parking garage at Champlain Towers South could have weakened key columns, triggering the wider disaster. But a mystery remained: How could the partial collapse of a patio have brought down much of a 12-story structure that had stood for 40 years?Ī Washington Post examination - based on witness accounts, photography, construction plans, interviews with engineers and a computer simulation using a 3-D model of the complex - explores that question. After the deadly catastrophe at a high-rise beachfront condo building in Surfside, Fla., in June, suspicion quickly focused on a pool deck outside, in part because years of deterioration had left it badly damaged. ![]()
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