Surfside

The condominium collapse at Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida is a moment of shame for engineering in this country.  The building  - part of which is still standing - was constructed in 1981 and should have lasted a long time. Instead, the developers took shortcuts with the construction, particularly worth the waterproofing on the pool deck.  The deck apparently was not sloped to allow water to drain away properly, which caused water to infiltrate the concert and lessen its structural integrity.  This is not the definite cause of the collapse, but it's a very likely cause for the disaster.

In fact, the homeowners' association at the condominium found a lot of structural-integrity problems in the concrete as recently as 2018, and fixing them would have cost thousands of dollars per resident.  Warnings about the structural integrity of the concrete were made as resident as this past April.

Some people think that such a residential building of such size and height (twelve stories) should have never been built.  I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that this disaster could have been avoided.  Ans hundreds of people would not have lost their lives.

And that is all I have to say abut this story, at least for the time being.