The recent building collapse near Miami set off a shit storm of accusations, lawsuits and criminal investigations that will last until all memory of the actual collapse is long gone.
Everyone is looking for someone to blame and a way to get their names in the papers or in front of voters and that’s the problem because in the end it will be damn near impossible to actually point to one person or agency and say, “You did it!” This is one of those situations where everyone is wrong and almost no one is at fault.
Even the earliest reporting tells us that the building had undergone an inspection in 2018 that revealed large cracks in the concrete and faults in the steel work. I bet you could say the same thing about half the buildings in the country over twenty-five years old. Would they be as bad as this one? Who knows?
The basis of the problem is pretty simple. South Florida was devastated by a huge hurricane a number of years ago. That resulted in Florida building codes being dramatically upgraded to help prevent further such devastation. The problem is, the codes were upgraded but the building departments weren’t. This is typical all across the nation where local governments work on taxpayer financed budgets. So the building department had new codes that required five times the amount of inspection the old codes did but no more people to carry them out and follow up on the results.
But that’s just the beginning of the problem. Once the building was inspected and the violations listed in 2018, something then had to be done to cure the violations. So they were presented to the building manager and he checked them out and called in a couple of contractors to give him an estimate on what it would cost to fix them. That took a few months and then he presented the bids to the condo board at a special meeting. Sounds simple right? It’s not. People join condo boards because they want to have a big say in how the building they occupy is run. That doesn’t mean they have any intention of inconveniencing themselves, so it takes the manager a couple of months just to set a date for a meeting that is agreeable to a quorum of the board members. Now we’re a year out from the inspection and nothing has really been done yet. The board finally looks at the numbers that the repairs are going to cost and panics. I understand that in this case the estimates ran to about $15 million, a not insignificant number for a building of this type and a killer for each condo owner. The result of this meeting is usually a demand by the board that t,,he manager find better numbers.
By this time the building department realizes that nothing has been done to correct the violations on the building and sends another inspector out to check out what is going on. The inspector realizing that the violations have not been dealt with, issues a series of crippling fines that result in panic at the next board meeting but unfortunately, not the selection of a contractor. It is now a year and a half into the violation and still nothing has been done to cure it.
When there is finally a contractor and he begins the laborious process of submitting plans for the cure of the violations to the city’s building and engineering departments, a process that closely resembles Dante’s sixth level of hell.
The contractor’s real job now is not to fix the building but to be a referee between the building and engineering departments, which never agree on anything but must inspect everything themselves, multiple times.
In the best of all possible worlds this is at least a six-month process but in Florida in 2020 and 2021it’s anybody’s guess how long this will take and that’s where we were when the building got tired of waiting and just collapsed.
So whose fault was it? Maybe it was the original contractor who might have used faulty or inappropriate materials. Or was it the management company who was not functional enough to drive the project ahead? Maybe it was the Condo Board or the owners who dragged their feet because either they couldn’t afford or didn’t want to spend for the repairs. Was it the building or engineering departments who continue to be too understaffed to do the work required by the new regulations? Was it the new contractor who wasn’t able to push the city fast enough? Was it all or none of them? It’s your guess because to me it looks like a giant cluster fuck that was set up to fail and was successful at it.
This is not the first building in this country that has collapsed and it won’t be the last. Certain things in the process described above can be fixed but not all can be solved. A lot of shifty lawyers are going to make a lot of money off that collapse but very little will actually change simply because it is the nature of man to act exactly the way all the actors in this play performed. And this is especially true in Florida.