Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Visiting Lecturer in Sustainable Development Ran Boydell, The horrific collapse of the condo building in Surfside may be a warning of things to come, if we don’t reduce CO2 emissions.
Most buildings were designed for an earlier climate – here’s what will happen as global warming accelerates
July 3, 2021 1.29am AEST
Ran Boydell
Visiting Lecturer in Sustainable Development, Heriot-Watt UniversityClimate change will affect every aspect of our lives – including the buildings we live and work in. Most people in the US, for example, spend about 90% of their time indoors. Climate change is fundamentally altering the environmental conditions in which these buildings are designed to function.
Architects and engineers design buildings and other structures, like bridges, to operate within the parameters of the local climate. They’re built using materials and following design standards that can withstand the range of temperatures, rainfall, snow and wind that are expected, plus any geological issues such as earthquakes, subsidence and ground water levels.
When any of those parameters are exceeded, chances are some aspect of the building will fail. If there are high winds, some roof tiles may be ripped off. If, after days of heavy rain, the water table rises, the basement might flood. This is normal, and these problems cannot be designed out entirely. After the event has passed, the damage can be repaired and additional measures can reduce the risk of it happening again.
…
The tragic recent collapse of an apartment building in Miami in the US may be an early warning of this process gaining speed. While the exact cause of the collapse is still being investigated, some are suggesting it might be linked to climate change.
…
Whether or not the link to climate change proves to be true, it is nevertheless a wake up call to the fragility of our buildings. It should also be seen as a clear demonstration of a critical point: wealth does not protect against the effects of climate change. Rich nations have the financial clout to adapt more rapidly and to mitigate these impacts, but they can’t stop them at the border. Climate change is indiscriminate. Buildings are vulnerable to these impacts no matter where in the world they are, and if anything, the modern buildings of developed countries have more things in them that can go wrong than simpler traditional structures.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/most-buildings-were-designed-for-an-earlier-climate-heres-what-will-happen-as-global-warming-accelerates-163672
I tried to find Ran Boydell’s staff entry on the Heriot-Watt university website, but his name didn’t appear in my search.
As for Ran’s claim about the building collapse being caused by climate change. We are used to climate scientists trying to opportunistically attach themselves to any recent crisis, to push their fear mongering. But in my opinion trying to exploit the Miami building collapse, before the investigation has concluded, while people are still searching for bodies, sets a new low for this kind of behaviour.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Sure, why not? LOL
More like clear sign of government failure and corruption.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-op-com-grimm-south-florida-building-inspectors-corruption-20210702-6u6kamfs4vcefatc6iqbidns6y-story.html
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article252466253.html
Why post links that are not accessible without a subscription. Dumb.
You got my curiosity up, so I visited the links posted. /They worked fine for me.
Wonder why, since others of us got this: “THIS IS EXCLUSIVE CONTENT RESERVED FOR OUR SUBSCRIBERS
The first link said it was “not available” in my part of the world, which I guess is there refusal to adopt EU cookie policy.
The second worked.
Look at the garage roof in the second link. Ripped out rebar everywhere. I looks likely they poured plaster instead of concrete.
This is much closer view of what we could see in all the floor sections which were exposed last week. The rebar ripped out on the underside. This view does seem to show the bar was deep enough, so this probably means they were using substandard concrete. Indeed I don’t see any hardcore there, it looks like very homogenous, fine grained mix. Strange.
Lawsuit against Exxon Mobil? Exxon knew 60 years ago?
It’s like the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon game – I can get to Climate Change in seven steps – racism in six-steps, and anti-capitalism in one.
Never let a disaster go to waste – immediate exploitation.
I read an analysis in The Graun that argued that sea level rise “acceleration” meant salt water was rising up through the limestone foundations faster than expected and this was causing the rebar to rust and expand, making the concrete foundations crack and split.
They also mentioned that that part of Florida is subsiding at 2mm a year!
The oceans have been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age… not a debatable point!
The two millimeters are two dimes worth per year. It is out in plain view why would it be unexpected if the danger was so obvious?
So come on, which is it, the salt, the water, or both, let’s have a decision here based upon a terrible tragedy resulting in the loss of life? I know nothing about structural engineering being a retired Chartered Structural Engineer (UK), however, I suspect a combination of water, salt, poor foundation design, poor construction, poor quality control on site, poor quality control off site, poor supervision by the authorising organisation, but a meagre 1.1 degree rise in globally averaged temperature over the last 150+ years I very much doubt had anything to do with any of it!!! BTW down here in south-west UK it’s bright & sunny at present, mind you that could change anytime, damned Climate Change, why won’t the weather behave itself!!! Sarc BS meter swithed off!!!
Rebar? Do you see any rebar sticking out of the part still standing?
we have a winner….
The forensic found they used less steel/rebar than was called for…
I wasn’t aware the full investigation into the cause of the building collapse had already been completed and a report on such issued to the public.
Please provide a link to the final report findings.
Yes . . . quite a bit actually. Consult the photos.
The only rebar I can see is hanging freely in the air because it ripped out of the concrete. Clearly something was not built correctly.
Look at the garage roof in the second link above. ALL the rebar is stripped out. The same thing can be seen in the floors exposed in the part which collapsed.
That is NOT how “steel reinforced concrete” works.
The rebar you see “hanging freely in the air” actually trances back, in almost every case, to the lower 1-2 inches of the concrete slabs comprising the floor/ceilings of the remaining standing structure. The central area of the total building (the portion that first collapsed) sheared away in a completely different manner from the “tower” that collapsed 2-3 seconds later: in that section one does not see into the various rooms as one does on the tower section. However, there is still evidence of the rebar being peeled away from the vertical surfaces, indicating that it was not properly buried in the interior of the concrete walls.
I agree 100% that this is NOT how steel-reinforced concrete is designed to be used in structural elements.
Never let a disaster go to waste.
“traveling lecturer”
AKA ambulance chasing hawker of leftist snake oil.
I wonder if Griff or Simon wrote this
Too many big words in the article.
Too be fair, neither of them ‘write’ anything. They repeat talking points or attach links. Loydo too. An original thought is beyond them.
Apparently he made this prophetic statement on some part of the ‘Hurry Up and Wait’ campus and then just Ran, leaving all to wonder Watts Up with Boydell.
“Never let a crisis go to waste” is a motto of the AGW fearmongers.
AGW is build on shaky ground, in fact, its foundation is weak.
The entire AGW scam is a top-down creation. Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes these in his book Anti-fragile as fragile creations. Because they are top down built and thus is fragile. Being fragile, they can collapse easily when even mildly shocked with new information and better ideas
The Marxist Left has recognized this fragile feature of their Climate Scam. Thus they must suppress counter-evidence and also scientific critics bringing new data and alternative interpretations. i.e the Cancel Culture is born in this suppression.
Excellent comment, thank you Joel.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/06/05/un-climate-message-we-are-rapidly-reaching-the-point-of-no-return/#comment-3263039
[excerpt]
The global warming alarmists’ abysmal predictive track record:
The global warming alarmists have a NO predictive track record – they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction – nobody should believe them.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility – their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
The wolves, proponents of both the very-scary Global Warming / Climate Change scam and the Covid-19 Lockdown scam, know they are lying. Note also how many global “leaders” quickly linked the two scams, stating ”to solve Covid we have to solve Climate Change”- utter nonsense, not even plausible enough to be specious.
Regarding the sheep, especially those who inhabit our universities and governments:
The sheep are well-described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the landmark text “The Black Swan”, as “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” or IYI – IYI’s hold the warmist views as absolute truths, without ever having spent sufficient effort to investigate them. The false warmist narrative fitted their worldview, and they never seriously questioned it by examining the contrary evidence.
The entirety of the alarmist climate scam is summed up in H.L. Mencken’s 1918-era quote from his book “In Defense of Women.”
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken, “In Defense Of Women”
Rahm Immanuel, I believe. originally voiced it.
This is getting a lot of South Florida attention. One of Biden’s cabinet suggested sea level rise. NOPE.
The 2018 engineering inspection showed seriously deteriorating concrete from corroding rebar (thing is on the ocean, and they did not use epoxy coated rebar to prevent salt corrosion), especially under the pool plaza which also had an improperly designed waterproofing. And this morning, as the implosion crew was drilling to place explosives in the remaining vertical columns to take the remaining portion down, it was discovered that there is less ‘Tbar’ tying the remaining vertical columns to the foundation slab than the design had called for. At that time, rebar was super expensive.
So:
-flawed design 1980 (flat rather than sloped waterproofing-no drainage)
-construction corners cut 1981 (bare steel, not enough steel)
-poor maintenance detected 2019 but deferred for cost reasons until mandatory 40 year building recertification.
Collapse just before overdue concrete repair was scheduled to start in July.
NOTHING climate related despite the nutty professor.
Good summary. The original crooks are long gone.
But if the construction company was distressed by the upcoming global warming and Covid, we probably can tie this tragedy to both, right?
The building engineers, contractors, inspectors were stressed to the point of not doing their jobs professionally or ethically, which is possibly due to climate change. Greed and laziness are typical of overexposure to CO2, specifically that in the bubbles of beer.
Though I can not find the video, a retired civil engineer, I believe, described a truly plausible scenario based on his career knowledge.
“Miami building failure.
Post tension flat slab concrete with internal cable failure at lower level. ”
Versus static slab construction of most other buildings.
Firstly, he stated he would never accept an engineering project of this style of construction because in the first place it’s cheap. Secondly, as he described it, this is a stack of cards construction where a weakness at any point in the cabling system for post tensioning creates a vulnerability in the Whole system.
The pool deck thing is a rational point of weakness and corrosion where the cabling is hidden internally and inspection difficult.
His final read was that there are many, many buildings that used this construction technique 40 years ago and they are All vulnerable. He referred to the many buildings in Florida and up the east coast and he finally stated that buildings of this type may become uninsurable. Yikes!
Engineers of this level of integrity keep the rest of us safe.
Except the pictures show this was not cable tensioned slabs. There are Miami Dade rescue pictures of the collapsed garage under the still standing west portion of the building clearly showing ‘columns punch thru shear where the garage slab simply fell leaving its inadequate slab rebar dangling out the sides of the column. Probably a secondary rather than primary cause. And may not be a single primary cause, rather two or three all mutually reinforcing.
Anybody who claims to know what caused the building collapse is a liar. End of story.
Why is that?
The investigations (there will be multiple investigations, and they will not all come to the same conclusions, count on it) into the causes of the collapse have not even begun yet, let alone concluded.
Anybody who says they know the cause of the collapse is therefore a liar and a fraud.
But it’s easier to just blame climate change than to actually do anything about it.
Intellectual dishonesty and stupidity know no boundaries these woke days…
The agenda is all that counts. The main media outlets have burned their journalism reputations in a self immolation by now pushing false agenda driven narratives on everything from Trump to COVID to the Climate Scam.
And they have no problem with children being used as human shields.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2021/07/04/wuhan-flu-the-children-are-our-human-shields/
Handmade tales in the service of agenda are a principle of ethical (“religious”) pride.
I notice the article is littered with the subjective “may” – not a “will” to be found. I say a catastrophic comet MAY strike Earth long before man made CC has any effect.
Send money!
Climate change causes dementia.
Build a building using concrete and rebar next to the ocean and have the basement be below sea level and not tend it and that is caused by CO2? Sorry drekbrain, I think not.
Perhaps we should stop people visiting the coliseum in Rome. Its withstood the roman warm period the MWP and the LIA I’m not sure it can take much more.
No rebar. But the non-fossil fuel based wooden coliseum floor and beam structure on the interior long ago decayed away. Cut stone blocks in compression loading arch designs are how they survive in those Rome mild winters (little freeze thaw cycling).
Roman concrete differs in important ways from modern:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
Joel and John I know roman concrete differs from modern concrete and I know they didn’t use rebar. There are castles in UK that survived the MWP and the LIA with plenty of freeze thaw cycling. I was taking the p*ss in my original post. I apologise if I have misunderstood your comments.
Most concrete from the Roman era wasn’t anywhere near as consistent as our modern concrete, so most of it has long ago crumbled away. However, they noticed over a couple of generations that concrete made with a particular volcanic sand from the town of Pozzuoli lasted impressively well. This was due to anti-crack propagation properties of the material. Our entire concrete construction industry is cost optimized for a life cycle of about 200 years, rebar is readily available, and Pozzuoli sand or a synthetic equivalent would be more expensive than people generally would want to pay.
There is zero evidence that ground water intrusion (allegedly related to claimed sea level rise under the Climate Scam) led to that condo collapse. None. People claiming that are just making sh!# up to serve an agenda. Any academic who claims this, and should know better, is simply a liar.
What seems obvious to me is the structural slab underneath the condo pool was catastrophically compromised by a break-up/rupture in the pool plumbing and the pool itself that sent tens of thousands of gallons of poll water into an already weakened structure The structural slab and columns already had been noted with extensive rebar corrosion from what was likily a leaking pool for years. There are pictures of standing water in the pool pump-filter room under neath the slab that supported the pool. Chlorinated pool water easily leads to corrosion of rebar through cracks in concrete that had been noted but not repaired.
That inrush of pool water likely led to a slab-column punch through under the weakened corroded reinforced concrete. When the slab gave way, the entire side of that condo collapsed like an implosion demolition under failing columns to a impulse dynamic loading.
Funny . . . the building/parking garage structure nearest the outdoor pool did not collapse . . . the building’s middle structure collapsed first, and then two-three seconds later the “tower structure” furtherest away from from the pool collapsed.
Also, photo at the top of the above article seems to show the outdoor pool being more or less full of water with no indication of “tens of thousands of gallons of pool water” having flooded toward the nearby garage structure, which is still standing.
You could set your watch on some self-appointed ‘expert’ blaming an obvious case of concrete rot on ‘climate change’.
What good is a watch that doesn’t go past 10 minutes?
What is the point of making good watches anyway as we are told we have 5 years, er 10 years, wait only 15 minutes, or something ,
before climate change kills all life on the planet ?
Surely the only watches that should be made now should count down to zero before we all vanish ? Like everything else including contracts for lying scumbag academics who tell us the world is good to end next week or the Arctic ice vanish and keep children terrified.
Put it in their contract!
Calling bad design and inadequate maintenance the result of climate change is as silly and uninformed as blaming Trump for the current illegal immigration crisis, although, there’s a lot we can legitimately blame on the fake fear of climate change.
Climaticphobia occurs under the auspices of social progress and social justice. One step forward, two steps backward.
“Climaticphobia”
I like that. 😎
But may I suggest “Climataphobia”?
(Rolls off the tongue easier?)
How bout “Climaphobia” or just “Climphob” or even “ClmF”
Where I live, the house was built around 1900, have I to fear al collapse ?
Btw, it would be the very first building collapsing because of CC.
In general, they collapse because of bad concrete, to much sand, but mostly following the money, and you know the reason.
Most houses built around 1900 used open slab limestone with a cement layer inside. It could work well for centuries if here wasn’t a lot of ground water to leak in.
In the neighborhood I lived in in St.Paul all the houses from downtown out were built that way. Every 10 blocks or so, 1 mile, was the distance for each new development extension. You can walk down any street going towards the river and see the change- free laid limestone slabs, cut slabs or block, smallish square precast concrete, bigger plain hollow blocks similar to current concrete block, next the the blocks were decorated to imitate carved rock, then modern concrete block, and then each house used a somewhat different foundation style ending up with various poured concrete foundations.
As long as the groundwater was controlled everything worked well.
“…trying to exploit the Miami building collapse, before the investigation has concluded, while people are still searching for bodies, sets a new low for this kind of behaviour.”
A good leftist never lets a tragedy go to waste. Anything that can be used to push their message and agenda, will be used. The ends justify the means.
Wicked solutions to purportedly hard problems seems to be their common cause and religious (i.e. behavioral protocol) imperative.
MIAMI STREETS appeared In BBC Shukman’s many-layered lying when Trump pulled the American taxpayer out of the Paris Agreement. MIAMI STREETS appeared as one of the three lies tarnishing the end of Attenboro’s marvellous Blue Planet. No one mentions that much of Miami was built below King Tides level and that eastern Florida is sinking tectonically. MIAMI STREETS is southern POLAR BEARS
It collapsed right into its own footprint. The corrosion must have been very evenly distributed.
Nothing at all unusual about a building collapsing straight down.
When the first column gives way, the load spreads to the next which also collapses, then the next collapses and pretty quickly then have all given way.
This process can occur in 10’s to 100’s of milli-seconds.
“Nothing at all unusual about a building collapsing straight down”.
No,
but some interesting fluid dynamics goes on in the process, as rubble & debris start acting like a viscus liquid.
The twin towers was a prime example of a progressive collapse, each floor collapsing onto the one below increases mass & velocity resulting in a percussion effect several floors below each last collapse (the pictures of which lead to conspiracy theory’s of controlled demolition ). There is also a horizontal cushion of air expelled from between each floor at high velocity taking light debris out sideways, some of which go up & then back in towards the building center as there is now an area of low pressure in the space the building occupied.
Slow motion film of tower collapse
https://youtu.be/I5V3JTO4kmM
Great video.
Thank you.
I worked for the Manhattan engineering company that designed the internal systems of the building.
Each floor is attached to a square pattern of columns with brackets
.
When one floor falls on top of the floor below, then two floors fall on the next floor below, etc.
The plane mostly evaporated (aluminum vapor) upon impact on the building. Heat of impact.
In a short time, resulting fires weakened the floor connections to the columns, etc.
From images accompanying the 2018 engineering inspection, it was. The vertical concrete support columns were all exposed to salt spray entering the partly open parking (foundation slab) level. They all had severe spalling from rusting bare rebar (which swells) from salt intrusion from sea spray. We see the same thing in Chicago freeway vertical concrete; the salt there comes from seasonal winter road salt so is not year round like Champlain Towers South.
We live directly on the ocean on the twelfth floor in Fort Lauderdale, about 50 miles up the sand from the disaster. We have to clean salt spray off the massive hurricane proof balcony glass facing the ocean about once a month, from salt spray when waves break on the beach during the every afternoon onshore breeze.
Our building used coated rebar. The vertical support columns are all exposed in the three story garage structure. There is ZERO spalling since completion in 1997.
Rud
Thanks for the detailed description.
For Australian context of timing, this was all generally understood by late 80s.
The new concrete code was AS 3600 in 1994, but the draft version was already being used in 1991 because the old versions clearly redundant.
Rud
A bug of mine, is when I walk through underground car parks and see workers adding another service ( usually by drilling 4” hole)through the slab.
Unchecked over time these modifications while incrementally small could become the straw on that breaks the camels back.
I’m sure people have seen the apartment buildings in China that fell over some years ago
I show those pictures to people all the time
The Denver Post lynched Andarko and the entire O&G industry over a NG house explosion in Firestone.
NTSB concluded that the active lines were severed most likely by the excavation contractor who did not conduct a proper locate.
Standard practice for the lying, fact free, fake news MSM.
Of course, the bureaucrats were right on top of this. From the sounds of the interchange, the repairs might have started in 2025. https://nypost.com/2021/07/04/surfside-florida-condo-accused-town-of-delaying-major-repairs/
These people are positively morbid.
30 years of not keeping up maintenance on a building and pool complex built in a faulty manner is the cause.
But of course the warmunists think CAGW can cause anything.
Or that deferred maintenance kills. Folks, you can’t put your name on repairs. Ever see an OLD building or road repaired and named for a politician? How old are the water pipes YOU are drinking from? I mean all the way back to the source. The power grid? Hell, your cable internet fiber?
Author… yet another “Bet Your Reputation and Resume on Climate Change” ~ everything-is- caused-by-climate-change” … “unique-and-holistic-view-of-the-world” — Ran Boydell’s Linked-In bio reads:
[Quote] Ran Boydell has studied and practised architecture in the UK and his native Australia for over three decades, with particular emphasis on sustainability, heritage, and rural architecture. This includes time spent as designer, developer, regulator and educator, as both project manager and initiator. Project experience ranges from single-family houses to substantial commercial developments, as well as master planning and policy guidance, for clients in the public, private and community sectors. This has given Ran a unique and holistic view “from all sides of the table” of the built environment and the building procurement process. “Today Ran is passionate about delivering on zero-carbon targets, implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and working across disciplines and industry sectors to help drive a rapid and radical transition to a sustainable economy. He was a founder of #ArchitectsDeclare in Australia, teaches university courses on sustainable development, and is a pioneer of sustainable homes for the mass market through his “ecohus” brand.
Before Ran was born, a Florida author and screenwriter named John D. McDonald documented (in several works of fiction and non-fiction) how developers were building shoddy condominiums that were predictablly bound to fail in just this fashion.
How nice that Ran can take advantage of the pain and suffering of other people to sell his services for a higher price.
No mention of experience in large high-rise condos nor large-scale excavations and foundations. Fraud.
From his bio “. I am particularly interested in what practical actions we can take to create a rapid and radical transition to a sustainable society.
Renewable energy is an essential part of this, including building-integrated generation but also storage, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and active grid management, as part of an emerging energy system whereby resource generation is distributed (Distributed Energy Resource system). ”
Society is doing just fine without all of your BS …
😉
As a Scot, I wish to apologise for this steaming heap of drivel from Heriot-Watt University. If you are not British, you may not have heard of Heriot-Watt which is in Scotland.
Aye, and the “Watt” it’s named after is none other then James Watt, inventor of the first practical steam engine. If he was alive now …..
You should have kept quiet. Now we will all put Scotland on our watch list.
It’s not actually from Heriot-Watt, but from an Australian activist and architect who works in the UK. To qualify for the title of ‘visiting’ lecturer he probably only gave a couple of lectures on his favourite subject but believes the connection to a University gives him more credence. The University may well be completely unaware that he’s using their name in his activist pieces.
You might well be right about Heriot-Watt being unaware of this tosh. This climate change claim is so patently ridiculous that even most climate alarmists are saying nothing about it. However, I have not heard of any climate alarmists condemning this utter nonsense either. But climate alarmists are notorious for their dishonesty and lack of integrity.
I wonder how much delay all the various “closed-due-to-COVID” planning/permitting offices contributed. I know the department that hears appeals to King County, WA property tax assessments has been closed for over a year. In the meantime, property owners must pay tax based on the latest appraisal. No idea how backed up they are, but “about a year” would be a reasonable guess.
The kind of repair work the Surfside condo board were planning to do requires dozens of permits.
I read somewhere that the condo building had been sinking 2 mm a year, on those smallish concrete columns that were holding it up. That apparently also didn’t have enough rebar as per the original plans. I don’t know how far the concrete columns went down into the limestone ‘rock’, but any limestone is susceptible long term to erosion from water. If the pool had been leaking down into the ground below the condo and was slightly acidic, then a good possibility that the limestone starting rotting out allowing the building to shift slowly over time until something snapped. Not a sinkhole, but just eroding limestone without the basic strength to hold it up. Nothing to do with any minimal rising sea level, which would be alkaline pH anyway. Just natural rain water drainage which has an acidic pH would also contribute to the limestone decay.
I saw a video yesterday taken from the building next door. It was a stream of water pouring into the garage level of the building about 20 minutes before it collapsed.
Looked to me like a water main that had broken.
My guess is that whatever settling was occurring, had started to speed up.
One of the eyewitnesses (now missing and presumed dead) was on the phone with her husband when this started to happen. She told him the building was shaking and that a ‘sink hole’ had opened on the pool deck below their unit just before the phone went dead (collapse). That at least means part of the pool deck slabs collapsed into the parking garage below. Whether it means the below ground slab pilings had also collapsed into a subterranean ‘sink hole’ (support piling failure) is not (yet) known.
A water main supposedly broke in Georgia, and oops a US President lost the election, due to not supervised double/triple counting, as recorded on video.
Boy, did that water main break in Georgia ever cause a ‘sink hole’! The whole USA fell into a giant hole and there may be structural damage to the country if this carries on for long. And it turns out, that ‘water main break’ wasn’t really that serious, just a leaking toilet or something trivial they used to tell everyone to go home so the Democrats could cheat all night. As seen on TV.
Pretty much all pool water will be acidic. You generally need to add HCl continuously.
The 1997 landslip at Thredbo ski lodge, New South Wales:
Eighteen bodies were recovered and one survivor was rescued from under debris more than 60 hours later. Subsequent investigation found the cause of the landslide to be a leakage from the water main leading to the saturation of the fill embankment on the road.
Unless investigators at this Florida event have confidently eliminated this water/colloid/liquefaction mechanism, it might be fruitful to include it among possibilities. The topic is comparatively understudied in engineering and in geology. Geoff S
Earthling2,
No idea if this next bit applies in this Florida case, but it is a possibility.
Fine grained materials like soils can interact with water to set the conditions for colloidal liquefaction, often initiated by shock like a small earthquake or lesser pulse. Ones saw it happen to a dirt road when our tour bus hit a pot hole, bang suddenly axle deep in porridge. Reading of a leaky pool, possibly of liquefaction comes to mind. Geologically described by former colleague John Elliston who died last month aged 96. He was world leader on colloids in geology a much understudied topic. He was on that bus. Geoff S
I’m waiting for the ensuing lawsuits. I’m sure our court system will find the true cause of the building collapse. — Well maybe not. But I’m sure they’ll find someone to blame. Well, at least they’ll find someone with deep pockets to “compensate” everyone. 😒