Entire Side of Condo Building Collapses Near Miami Beach

The condo HOA owns the buildings and common areas and is responsible for seeing that appropriate and timely repairs & maintenance happens. These are often delayed in an effort to keep dues lower. A healthy HOA will keep a large reserve (like a homeowner's savings account) but the reserve is often robbed to keep dues lower. Owners who elect uninformed, irresponsible or self-serving members to serve on their boards are asking for trouble. Serving on the Board of Directors is a job few want. It's often volunteers who serve.

As this shakes out, I would be interested in knowing what liability the HOA Board of Directors might have. Is there insurance to provide protection from poor performance?
 

helenbacque said:
The condo HOA owns the buildings and common areas and is responsible for seeing that appropriate and timely repairs & maintenance happens. These are often delayed in an effort to keep dues lower. A healthy HOA will keep a large reserve (like a homeowner's savings account) but the reserve is often robbed to keep dues lower. Owners who elect uninformed, irresponsible or self-serving members to serve on their boards are asking for trouble. Serving on the Board of Directors is a job few want. It's often volunteers who serve.

As this shakes out, I would be interested in knowing what liability the HOA Board of Directors might have. Is there insurance to provide protection from poor performance?
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This is how they keep the purchase price low or still attract buyers with lower dues. This is the dirty little secret of condo living.

It hurts those who purchases decades ago because they probably has reasonable maintenance fees. I lived near a brand new condo built right before the boom. Average unit under $200k and monthly maintenance under $300, less than 5 years later at the peak of the boom average unit $400K-$700k and $700 a month maintenance along with water issues(in a new building) AND a missing Canadian developer (The collapsed building also had a Canadian developer with issues. I digress)

There should be somekind of insurance, a bond or service plan that could cover repairs like these rather than tap or accumulate a budget. My guess if these realtors and property managers/owners were upfront and prepared for issues like this no one would be buying units in their buildings.
 
This morning there was this story. A young women was on the phone with her husband telling him she just saw the swimming pool collapse in a sink hole then her phone went dead. There are already three class action lawsuits filed by lawyers with grey slimy skin.
 

helenbacque said:
I would be interested in knowing what liability the HOA Board of Directors might have. Is there insurance to provide protection from poor performance?
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In Canada there is insurance for the volunteers on a HOA/strata.

There was an article that said the other tower was run by a different Board of Directors. They dealt with there problems as soon as they were reported.
 
Workers have now removed more than 3 million pounds of debris from the site, just to give people an idea of the colossal amount of debris left to clean up, and the sheer amount of weight that's resting on those who were taken when the building collapsed.

I don't support news reports continuing down the path of, "workers are still holding out hope of finding survivors".

We're into day 7 on this, this has moved well past the stage of finding survivors now.
 
Aunt Marg said:
We're into day 7 on this, this has moved well past the stage of finding survivors now.
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That's right....there is virtually NO chance of finding anyone still alive under this debris. Even if someone survived the initial crash, they would have suffered a miserable and lingering death, by now. There was even reports of fires in the debris, a few days ago, and the fire departments had to spray huge amounts if water into the pile to quench the fires....anyone trapped there would have drowned.

Now, the biggest danger is to the workers who are removing the debris....they face risk of getting caught in shifting concrete, etc. It may be weeks before all the rubble and human remains are removed.
 
Don M. said:
That's right....there is virtually NO chance of finding anyone still alive under this debris. Even if someone survived the initial crash, they would have suffered a miserable and lingering death, by now. There was even reports of fires in the debris, a few days ago, and the fire departments had to spray huge amounts if water into the pile to quench the fires....anyone trapped there would have drowned.

Now, the biggest danger is to the workers who are removing the debris....they face risk of getting caught in shifting concrete, etc. It may be weeks before all the rubble and human remains are removed.
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Yes indeed, Don. To think about the fires that were burning under the rubble, the smoke, the heat, the wet, the clouds of dust and particulate and debris in the air... that alone would have been suffocating.

Do you have any thoughts on what's going to happen to the rest of the building that's still standing?

My thought from day one has been, they are going to raze it.
 
Aunt Marg said:
Do you have any thoughts on what's going to happen to the rest of the building that's still standing? My thought from day one has been, they are going to raze it.
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The rest of that building will Certainly have to be removed, once any remaining bodies are found. It apparently has had reports of problems in the past...which seem to have been ignored. There are similar structures nearby, which also might require some Serious inspection for equally serious problems.

Construction in these types of areas needs to be far better monitored and regulated. Building Anything in such an area, which consists of little other than sand, and a base of porous Limestone underneath, is just asking for trouble in the future.
 
Don M. said:
The rest of that building will Certainly have to be removed, once any remaining bodies are found. It apparently has had reports of problems in the past...which seem to have been ignored. There are similar structures nearby, which also might require some Serious inspection for equally serious problems.

Construction in these types of areas needs to be far better monitored and regulated. Building Anything in such an area, which consists of little other than sand, and a base of porous Limestone underneath, is just asking for trouble in the future.
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I agree with all wholeheartedly.

Shame on regulations surrounding the inspection of building sites.

IMO any building that requires a $15 Million price tag to repair should be shuttered.
 
That is a grisly task they are doing. Those bodies should be in a state of decomposition in that Florida heat as well as mangled. There will be cases of PTSD when it's over.
 
This morning, they showed video from several months ago of the cracked foundation & terrible condition of the building's frame. Of course the owners decided it was too costly to repair.
 
Our noon news showed a picture an electrical contractor took when he was in the basement a week before & gave it to the authorities showing big cracks in the cement & rebar sticking out of the cement also. Still, no one did anything about it????
 
Anyone think there could have been misappropriation of monthly condo fees? I don't know, but I'll bet the owners paid plenty a month. They were going to add a 15 million dollar assessment on these people. What the... I know there is ongoing maintenance with a building like that but there should also have been money in an account. And a good amount of it.

Those poor souls and families. I agree, rescue now is futile. It's recovery only now for the families, so they know when their family members have been found.
 
Aunt Marg said:
I don't support news reports continuing down the path of, "workers are still holding out hope of finding survivors".

We're into day 7 on this, this has moved well past the stage of finding survivors now.
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I agree the odds of finding a survivor in the rubble are pretty low at this point, but not zero so they need to continue to try. I had a friend who survived the bombing of Dresden, he said survivors were found months after the fact, not many but a few. Folks trapped in basements with access to some food and water, but no way out. Different of course.

We have a lot to be thinking about with respect to construction of this kind. I don't think we should be doing much construction at all on these barrier islands, let alone these high rise structures. Beaches are probably best visited, not lived on, spoken as a person who lived in a beach house for a long time...

One problem is our whole federally backed flood insurance, without that much of this development would not be possible, financing would be much harder to get. It was the advent of such insurance ~50 years ago that lead to much of the coastal building boom. And it has cost all of us a lot of money. Poor standards and corrupt building inspections are just symptoms of the problem...
 
Alligatorob said:
I agree the odds of finding a survivor in the rubble are pretty low at this point, but not zero so they need to continue to try. I had a friend who survived the bombing of Dresden, he said survivors were found months after the fact, not many but a few. Folks trapped in basements with access to some food and water, but no way out. Different of course.

We have a lot to be thinking about with respect to construction of this kind. I don't think we should be doing much construction at all on these barrier islands, let alone these high rise structures. Beaches are probably best visited, not lived on, spoken as a person who lived in a beach house for a long time...

One problem is our whole federally backed flood insurance, without that much of this development would not be possible, financing would be much harder to get. It was the advent of such insurance ~50 years ago that lead to much of the coastal building boom. And it has cost all of us a lot of money. Poor standards and corrupt building inspections are just symptoms of the problem...
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What a happy story related to your friend.

I was viewing some images last night related to all of the rubble, and the best way I would describe it to someone who hasn't seen the aftermath, is the rubble looks as though it was poured out in liquid form, then it hardened.

It's a sickening sight. I cannot imagine how upsetting it must be to have to pull bodies out. I couldn't do it.
 
In my "expert opinion", I noticed that part of the building looks like it had been sheared off by a knife. The other section looks like what you would expect,- floors partially ripped away from the walls. You really have to let a concrete and steel building go before it collapses. I doubt a leaky swimming pool was the total culprit. That sheared section does not show floor bracing, You don't see any area where the floor beams were attached to the walls???? I wonder if wasn't just poor construction, and it's a wonder the building hadn't collapsed years ago. I had a contractor fix my home, and he hired extremely questionable subcontractors, who didn't know what the hell they were supposed to do.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
In my "expert opinion", I noticed that part of the building looks like it had been sheared off by a knife. The other section looks like what you would expect,- floors partially ripped away from the walls. You really have to let a concrete and steel building go before it collapses. I doubt a leaky swimming pool was the total culprit. That sheared section does not show floor bracing, You don't see any area where the floor beams were attached to the walls???? I wonder if wasn't just poor construction, and it's a wonder the building hadn't collapsed years ago. I had a contractor fix my home, and he hired extremely questionable subcontractors, who didn't know what the hell they were supposed to do.
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I'm not holding a lot of hope over the idea that we'll ever know the honest-to-goodness truth.
 
I saw a report today that said this condo had about 48 million $'s in insurance. That won't even begin to cover the damage, and the upcoming lawsuits. Now, there are reports that some of the rescue workers are starting to have respiratory troubles...similar to the workers after the WTC was attacked. This mess just gets deeper with every passing day.
 
Don M. said:
the upcoming lawsuits
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Do we know anything about who is suing who and for what? It seems to me there may not be many good targets. The HOA belonged to and was controlled by the owners, the victims, hard to sue yourself. I suspect the original developer and contractors are long gone, and maybe protected by statute of limitation things. That doesn't leave much, the local building department for corruption/incompetence maybe?

I think we are likely to know the truth, or a pretty close version of it, as to the technical reasons, what went wrong structurally. It may take some time though.

Figuring out why mistakes were made and who might be to blame on the other hand will likely never be completely clear.
 

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