Surfside Building Collapse - Did the Champlain Towers South Garage Provide Warning Signs in 2020?

welcome to building integrity i'm josh porter and today we're going to be talking about the 2020 uh video walkthrough that uh has recently surfaced on youtube uh of the champlain tower south particularly the portion where um the person recording it walks through the garage uh i reached out to the person who recorded that video that is dr uh terenzi at fiu and and she was great gracious enough to let me use that video uh for for this content today uh before i get into that though i wanted to talk about two things and the first thing is i was watching the local news they had uh john pesterino on there who is a forensic engineer structural engineer and he also wrote the 40-year recertification process for miami-dade he has been hired by a law firm i don't know what party he is working with as an expert but he's going to be investigating this as part of the legal defense or offense uh prosecution type type deal um the uh interesting thing uh that he said though in this interview and i'm gonna quote it here real quick because it says he said concrete gives you a warning it gives you a warning it doesn't fail that fast and he almost seemed you know flabbergasted that this building collapsed which i think a lot of us structural engineers are shocked and kind of flabbergasted that this thing uh that this building fell in the way that it did um so talking about that and talking about you know the fact that he's been hired by a law firm i wanted to talk about a little bit of the legal process real quick uh in this situation first off you need to know everybody's gonna get sued okay um but when we're talking about uh let's say you know the the the engineering firms that get sued when an engineering firm gets sued uh their their their uh insurance is gonna come and they're going to usually pay for their defense and what's going to happen is that whatever party is suing them is going to have an expert witness and that expert witness is going to be a licensed professional engineer and that licensed professional engineer is going to look at all the evidence and he's going to conclude that that they did not follow a standard care for engineers and that they were negligent or however you want to say that but then on the other side on the defense side they are also the engineering firm won't be their own expert witness that their their attorney will find an engineer an expert witness and that expert witness will say no they followed all of the standard practices in standard care and i'm not i don't want to be casting judgments either way that's not my point of these videos my point is to educate you guys on the process educate you guys about structures and buildings and teach you something along the way as we analyze the champlain tower south situation but what it's going to come down to is if they don't settle they will end up in court and both sides and both experts will make their arguments but all the evidence will be presented to the jury and at the end of the day the jury has to decide uh whether there's you know negligence here or not and so as you watch this video and as you watch this analysis i want you to put on that your thinking cap and think like a juror and try not to jump to to to conclusions try not to pre-judge things look at the evidence look at what what's being told and then kind of come to your own conclusions all right so let's jump into this first what we're going to do is we're going to watch the video portion uh as she walks through the garage i've turned off the audio because it's not really necessary and then i'm gonna go and we're gonna we're gonna analyze some still frames uh of that video so let's go ahead and get this thing playing she starts on the east and i'll show you this on a key map she starts walking uh on the uh i'm sorry on the west side of the building underneath the driveway and underneath the uh above ground parking area and i don't think you know the intent was to necessarily record the condition she just noticed some things and kind of looked up as as she was going through this building so this is the stern elevator tower which is part of the portion of the building that that was remaining and then as she walks past that she starts walking towards the end of the building that did collapse and from here on this perspective on her right is the pool deck and on her left is the building and these three columns that she's walking by right now are the columns that we talked about in previous videos would be columns of concern that would be necessary to collapse in order to collapse this building okay so some of it's a little shaky but we're going to uh go through this but before we do i want to talk about some basic concepts if we are you'll need to know this kind of basic level construction engineering stuff in order to understand what you just saw in that video and to make sense of it so uh in this picture we show typical columns and a slab spanning across the columns okay this is kind of how it would be drawn on the drawings of course i have no notes no additional information is a very simple structure that i'm showing you now as a load is applied to this okay and we draw that load with arrows meaning that gravity is pulling that load down okay and as a load is applied to that slab that slab will deflect okay now this this uh picture is sort of an over exaggeration of how it would deflect but we do this in order to make it visible in understanding of the principles that are involved so when it deflects like this you have to think of concrete as a very stiff material it doesn't like to deflect it doesn't like to stretch and so what happens is is like in the middle here the concrete is pushing in on itself okay and we call that compression but in the bottom it's stretching apart okay we call that a tension force so what happens is in a slab like this the bottom of the slab would crack okay and it might have cracks that look like that and at the bottom of each one you'd have these series of cracks in the bottom of the slab okay so so but but the slab is designed should be designed to not crack so if the slab is not in this way yeah you know there's a an old adage where people say well you know concrete's supposed to crack but the reality is is that um concrete is is designed to resist cracking or control cracking and if it cracks it needs to be explained like why it's cracking and why that cracking occurs okay now this is a two-dimensional kind of cross-section view of what columns you know here's your columns okay and and the rest is your slab so this is this is sort of a two-dimensional view so i'm going to show you kind of like a three-dimensional view of what's going on here all right so here you can see it's a plate slab construction and it talk you don't need to read all the text and understand all the stuff but what i wanted you to to take away from this is you can see this deflection type shape between the columns here but in 3d that deflection shape takes place in two direction dimensions okay you got a curve there and you've got a curve there i don't know if you can see that i'll draw it in the white area so you got it curves like this and when it deflects it curves like that okay and what this creates is that when this slab uh uh uh um sags if you will in both directions in a what we call a two-way action okay don't worry about the one way don't worry about the catenary right now and i'm sure you've heard catenary action in other videos mentioned and i'm gonna do a video on that as well in the future but right now we're just talking about two-way action we're talking about two-way membranes when a slab when a when a plate slab construction becomes over-stressed it will actually crack in diagonals so here you can see you have your columns okay and uh and as well up here and so at each of the four corners you have columns but this is just a sample uh from a test specimen out of a uh study uh on two-way action slab failure and you can see that the primary cracking actually occurs in the diagonal directions now it doesn't mean that it won't crack in the vertical directions but the primary cracking is diagonal so remember that that's going to be important okay so first off i have a key uh you're gonna in order to orient you to what we're looking at there's a key at the bottom left of this image and that key shows a giant red arrow that is the positioning of where she was standing when this when the camera was pointing that particular direction when i took this screen grab and you're gonna see that throughout the rest of these shots the three red circles of course are the three columns if you don't know why those are important go back to my previous videos but these three columns one two or three of them would have been necessary for for for failure in order to trigger the rest of the collapse of the building what caused the failure of those three is still something we're all exploring in this industry in this picture i wanted to draw your attention to this object up here at the top of the picture this is actually corrugated plastic and it's uh installed there where there was a big crack in order to deflect and move water away from the cars that are coming through the cracks and i've seen this before in other buildings um and it's basically like a band-aid in order to keep expensive cars from getting damaged from the water that's coming through the ceiling now again this is spot 105 106. so this is over the drive area here this is over the drive area this is not part of the building that collapsed but the the information that we're going to gain from the west side and south side of the building is going to be useful uh information further on all right so let's get through these okay so the interesting thing i thought was here is that she's looking uh to the south wall and the retaining wall uh and she's looking at parking space 5254. one of the things that actually jumped out to me is yeah you have some water on the floor okay but i'm not we all know from pre if you've watched any of my previous videos and if you've listened to the news or anything we all know that this garage has been um dealing with water to the point where there might be a foot of water a foot and a half of water reported in the floor of this thing so it doesn't surprise me that and we all know from the morbido report that the slab above this was the waterproofing was either not there or it was in terrible condition so i'm not going to spend a lot of time pointing out every puddle on the ground it's needless to say that we're all aware that the building has a lot of water problems and a lot of water in the garage but one of the things i found really interesting was this slab here and it appears to have been a pretty significant chunk of slab replacement in in the concrete deck and then where that slab was replaced you have this rough concrete where it looks like maybe the joint spalled and they have done repairs to the spall and that's interesting to me because this is below what we've all been looking at before and this is going to tie into my next video but i just wanted to point that out in this image that that was really unique and that was interesting and you can see um as we look further down that uh that the um that that they that this line here continues all the way over okay and the puddle that's sitting on top of it doesn't maybe necessarily correlate to a specific crack or anything above but instead may uh be pertaining to the uh the water coming up through that joint itself okay so here is uh we're looking now at uh parking spaces 54 and 55 and i wanted to kind of point out you can see all these things sticking out from the ceiling and a closer view of those is here all right now i want to explain to you what you're looking at because there's three different things you're looking at here one of the things you're looking at when you see these white flecks like around this area you're actually looking at paint that is peeling off of the ceiling you can actually see a little bit of paint peeling here and you can see back here that there's you know actually quite a bit of paint peeling and and elsewhere around here okay so these are locations of peeling paint now the other thing that you'll see on this is you will see these evenly spaced you know white dots and you will see these white lines here and what these are is these are injection ports that were left there and so it's part of a practice when you want to inject a crack either if you're going to inject it with epoxy or you're going to inject it maybe with like a urethane to try to stop the water from leaking in you're going to install these plastic ports and then you're going to use them as injection spots in order to inject your product into the concrete cracks and what happened in this case and what happens i see a lot of times with contractors is they never got rid of the ports but not all of this dimpling and these these these artifacts can be described as ports in this area that i've just circled it appears to be more like stalactites which you'll see later on in this video but you can see this this ceiling is generally got a lot going on right okay and as you look up from that that last camera position when she looks straight up you can actually see the injection port here okay and you can see the injection ports down here but between the injection ports you can actually see stalactites here's some stalactites here's some stalactites and now the way you get those stalactites is water has to come from the top through the concrete it pulls the calcium out of the concrete it forms it's a bit of a longer chemical process but ultimately it ends up forming what's called calcium carbonate which is this white powdery stuff that forms these um these uh uh um these stalactites at the at the ceiling okay the the the other things to note in this picture is it looks like we have discolorations which appear to be rust okay but given that this this this interesting object here is sort of hanging down um and it's in its in and it doesn't kind of make a lot of sense to a lot of people what this tells me and especially looking at the rust uh or the rust color i should say at this port right here tells me that this looks like it was a location that was probably injected with urethane and which which was not effective and so as the water keeps coming through and keeps rusting the steel it actually colors the urethane it's almost like a you know can almost be like a sealant or a foam type material and it looks like it actually discolored it and some of that urethane looks like it maybe is has fallen down and is hanging uh from the ceiling at this point that's just my best guess on this but this does not look reminiscent of an epoxy injection to me it looks more like a urethane injection but pretty ugly you can see the paint is peeling around here we can see bare concrete and then we can also see that the paint is peeling around this location as well uh it just hasn't peeled off yet okay so here we're walking down the garage a little bit she's looking from the west to the east but she is still in the covered park just below the covered parking area and again i just kind of wanted to point out you've got a large area of peeling paint here you've got a large area of peeling paint maybe some injection ports some other things going on and then of course you have this very large area which we're going to get closer to in a second but the one thing that is a little difficult to see and it took me i had to really go by frame by frame because you know we walked through the garage so quick you can see there's a some sort of uh deformation or something here that looks like an angular crack okay and i thought oh that's that's interesting because if you remember back at the beginning when we started talking about uh um the way the way these plate slabs bend and and deflect that they will crack usually in diagonals that's the primary method of cracking if they're over stressed so here we've got this diagonal crack and in the next frame you can actually see that diagonal crack a little bit better okay and you can actually see another crack here and you can see that there's a crack here and maybe a crack here and then you've got this like circular motion towards the center now this crack is pointing from one column crosswise to another column so it's pointing from the column you can't see over to this column that you can see and so so this is very uh indicative to me of of a slab of a two-way functioning slab that is over stressed now if we go on to the next image okay we can actually see let me go back make sure i've got myself oriented okay so that's spot 50. so here's a little bit different view we've moved on a little bit further so here's that circular cracking i was talking about okay we can't see the crack anymore that goes up and we can't really see the well you can kind of see a little bit of these cracks okay but that correlates to this circle over here okay same one all right but then as we move on from parking space 50 to this column you can see that there's another crack line and you can see the injection ports hanging from it so no again another diagonal crack now there could be a crack going the up opposite diagonal direction but because of the way the light hits the crack and the way the the the camera is angled we just may not be able to see it but again another angular crack for cross column to cross column all right so and then uh as the video and i'm just going in order and that the video went in generally so uh so when we turn around uh you can see down here in the in the key in the bottom left she's now looking at the vestibule with the elevators in them and she's looking at these spots the one thing i wanted to point out in this picture is again the corrugated plastic on the ceiling and you can see a little bit of something there but i don't think that's as important because we can't really conclude anything from that line but you can see the corrugated uh um plastic paneling on the ceiling and again the only reason you would put that up there is to keep water off of the cars and the only reason why you would have that much water coming through to even get onto cars is because there's a crack there now the interesting thing about this is this corrugated panel if we can assume that there's a crack over this corrugated plastic notice that it is if there's a crack over that it's perfectly perpendicular to to uh the the edge of the slab because the slab actually changes elevation there and that actually fits because at the edge of a slab a a plate slab construction does not behave as a two-way slab it behaves as a one-way slab and in a one-way slab you would expect the cracks in a distressed concrete to be perpendicular to the edge of the concrete so this actually fits with where it's located and this again lends more uh evidence to the fact that the slabs were cracking under heavy stress okay if you just look a little bit over to the left here you've got that plastic again that corrugated plastic and then you have uh now it's gone as far as it can and over here this slab becomes two-way so from right about here you've got one-way action slab and so your crack would be perpendicular to the slab edge okay and then over here you have two-way well in a two-way slab again like we talked about before you would expect the cracks to be angular well here's your angular crack coming off from that crack all right and these would probably connect under there so this all fits with what i'm talking about as far as the way that we would expect a distressed crack a distressed uh plate slab two-way plate slab to crack and what the cracks actually look like and crack geometry is so important for this industry and for for our career and a lot of people don't know how to read or understand crack geometry to determine is it just a crack or is it does it is it indicative of something more serious okay so moving on you can see uh now we're back towards the south side looking at the parking spaces 40 and and whatnot and you can just see the amount of paint peeling off of the ceiling now the reason why all this paint would be peeling off of the ceiling and coming down is because when concrete is very saturated and very wet and that water is bringing down with it that calcium chloride that i mentioned before that calcium mineral out of the concrete and that leaves that white powdery substance well that white powdery substance actually pushes the paint off of the concrete and so the paint has nothing to stick to anymore because it can't stick to a powder and so it flaps down and it hangs down so you this is just all of this peeling paint in the ceiling is just very indicative of a very very wet concrete in a very wet environment and then of course again you can see the corrugated plastic here and you can see the corrugated plastic here which means there are cracks over those areas okay so now we start heading toward the area of the building that collapsed if you look down in your key i will draw roughly uh the building collapsed something like this you know and then it kind of went around the pool and that is like your area of collapse so now you can see where the red arrow is that we are beginning to walk into that area and look that way now you can only see column two and you can see column one okay but what's interesting is now you can begin to see that there is this you know corrugated here's that corrugated plastic again we can't really see where it's at we'll pick that up in the next frame but again we're moving on down this uh white jeep here okay this white jeep is actually parked in parking space 77 so it's parked right here all right just to kind of give you guys an orientation so your ramp is just beyond uh and again these three uh circles here are indicating the columns that we suspect would have had to have gone uh she turns a little bit to the right that picks up column three and then you can still see uh column two and one in her vision uh actually no i'm sorry this is a column two so she stepped forward and this is column two and this is now column one and then here you can see that corrugated plastic and notice the orientation of the corrugated plastic okay it's not at an angle it's actually at a perpendicular location and it's very close to the columns which we didn't see in any of the previous video that these corrugated plastic was right up against columns that's really interesting and odd and for this location um so i'll show you exactly where and again the corrugated plastic i think it's a reasonable to assume that the corrugated plastic is there because there's a crack there and we're trying to keep the water off of the cars right so if you look at the uh uh the uh the pool level plan okay you'll see that in the in this uh orangish color here okay this is the area where we know um that the concrete and the uh uh planter boxes collapsed we can see that in that video that was recorded about seven minutes before i did a video on that video and you can see the debris i call it debris and rubble but we know that that's generally this this square okay and so it's shaded orange that um that plastic that you see here okay that i've circled that corrugated plastic is this red rectangle here okay that's exactly where it's located and so that's really interesting because what that tells me is if i've got this plastic and it's and it's perpendicular to the line of the beams okay the beams are right here uh so if it's perpendicular to the line of the beams and it's located where it's located and you look at it on the plans and you transpose that well that's right where the deck meets the planter box okay so you can see that so this is deck whoops okay so this is deck here and then this is one of your planner boxes right here so that that that crack is right where the deck meets the planner box that's interesting and that's something that will be useful as the forensic engineers that are that are really on site and really doing this they will use this video and trust me they will use that piece of information again you can't draw a conclusion from that piece of information but it's like another piece to the puzzle right and we're trying to solve the puzzle um that's what they will be trying to do okay and then here you can see that plastic a little bit better in that location she's almost staring straight at um this column here right at the end of of location 70s or of a parking space 77 and 76 and again you can see all of the peeling paint uh maybe old injection ports stalactites just a bunch of of a mess going on on the ceiling on this location to the right of that column okay now this area here between this column and us is the drive this main drive going through and you can see that on the bottom key where where she's looking that way but she's still concealed uh or behind column one and uh so what that this is column one here obviously in column two and column three so she's behind and i may have misnumbered him before no i don't think i did but anyway so this is column one and then and then this is the drive area through the middle of the garage now one of the things i want you to notice uh in this image and she pans a little bit to the left here is this area here okay has a bunch of stuff going on it has a blister a paint blister it has a bunch of stalactites and peeling paint i mean the whole thing it looks like a series of cracks it just looks like a a mess okay and she actually steps forward or steps to the left a little bit towards the um ramp and she turns back and you can actually see this difference although i want to go back real quick in this image though you see you don't see any issues here it looks clean and i've watched this video a couple times it's not just like that it's blurry or anything there is a sharp cutoff point where all of this is it looks uh you know looks bad if you will and this looks good okay so just from visual that doesn't mean it is structurally good or it is structurally bad but it just looks this part looks bad that part looks good right okay so the uh so as you as you go to the next frame you can see okay well there's a ledge here where the slab changes elevation all right and where is that ledge uh in relationship and again i highlighted that this is the bad portion right so i'm highlighting this this red area as being the bad a bad looking portion the portion that has a high water content it has efflorescence it has peeling paint and so on and if you transpose that area onto the area of debris that fell that is this reddish or pinkish rectangle here that i just circled on the drawing that location is the location that is this right so so and then and then over here where it looks you know pretty good uh this area is this area over here and so you can see that there's a transition here between the planters which are located here and the upper level of the deck which is up here so there's this there's this there's this transition point right along here where it drops down and it looks relatively good to the north and it doesn't look so great to the south and the reason why this is important is because again this area here this whole area above that's in this picture is the area that collapsed and so you can see that there was some serious problems going on with the planters in this area the other thing i want to point out in this picture and i'll go back to this picture as well is if you look at this beam here okay this beam you can actually see and if you and if you may not be able to see it in my video you can go back and watch her video and i'll put it in the description a link to it but you will see that this this beam here looks very gray and washed out the paint has almost completely peeled off of this beam you can see a little bit of paint hanging on here a little bit of paint hanging on here a little bit of paint hanging on here you can see that over here you got your peeling paints here and here and here okay but for the most part this beam is very gray in color okay and and then it's got like a mottled whiteness to it and and and some unfortunately with frozen frames sometimes it's less it's easier to see things in motion than than than not but if you go back and watch this you'll see that this thing is has hardly any pain on it well why is that significant well that means that that whole beam is saturated almost constantly um it's it's indicative i should say that it's saturated constantly and it's a very wet environment because again very wet concrete will leach out those calcium carbonates and that calcium carbonate will push the paint off but leave like a white hazy color over a white chalky color over the concrete and that's exactly what we see here we see like a concrete color with a white chalkiness and they can't seem to keep paint on the thing to get it to stick and that's why we see the peeling paint okay so uh so this area here i was saying that this is the area that we saw the collapse i wanted to show that photo again the purple columns i'm going to label these you know column a and column b okay and when we come over here and we look at the video this is a still from the video of seven minutes or so before the collapse you can see let's see how i name them okay so you can see that this is column a right here and this is column b and then you can see the debris is here right and so um so so this is your debris area there's your column a there's your column b and then if you go back and you transpose that onto the drawing here's your column a here's your column b and here is your debris area i'll circle it again here's your debris area that we this now again and i've said this before in the previous video more than this might have fallen before the rest of the building collapsed but the only thing we can confirm from this video is that this area of debris that's on the ground the concrete and stuff that has fallen generally correlates to this area right here okay so uh finishing up her walkthrough of the building uh it's interesting she was i think she was looking for her parking space and she found it so this so the video pretty much came to a conclusion but one of the things i want to point out that's really interesting right towards the end of the video the whole time in the video you're either looking down you're looking at water or you're looking up and you're looking at corrugated plastic cracks efflorescence stalactites injection ports also sorts of stuff that are going on on the ceiling but if you look at this key she's standing generally right at the bottom of the um right at the bottom of the ramp and she's looking east and you can see this crack on the slab this is something nobody has really talked about yet uh too much like we've we've been talking basically from the garage up to the planter dot deck why did the planer deck collapse how did the building collapse was it catenary action and all these things that are being proffered out there as ideas and theories but nobody has really talked about the foundation of the building and if you come over here you can see that that crack actually proceeds and continues on in front of the a ramp area and you can actually see that there's another crack here and if you remember going back in earlier into the video you actually you can see there's a joint here that looks like it's been you know had some spalling issues and some repairs and things and if you remember going back earlier in this video i showed you things that were on the ground that looked very suspicious looked like parts of the concrete had been replaced so so that's what i want you guys to keep in mind because uh on our next video we're actually going to be covering issues related to the foundation how were the how how was the piling system designed how was this ground force lab designed and why does that matter to the investigators as they will be proceeding with their research and with their investigation into the causality of this collapse anyway that's all i have for today for this video i appreciate you guys watching take care

Channel: Building Integrity

Views: 258,934

Rating: 4.9239588 out of 5

Keywords: Champlain Towers South, Surfside, Miami, Collapse, Engineer, Garage, Structural

Id: ZAIJsaSo4Sw

Length: 33min 48sec (2028 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021