Transcription
We have updates into the investigation into the collapse of the Champlain Tower South Condominium here in Miami on June 24th, 2021. So, NIST is finally giving us an update into their 24 hypotheses and what they're more or less actively working on, what they're sort of narrowing their focus on.
This was a video call that NIST had on June 15th, and I was all ready to upload this video that weekend. But we all know what happened on the weekend of June 18th, folks. We had the Ocean Gate Titan sub implosion, and so I had to stop everything. And I must have uploaded seven or eight different videos covering every possible facet of this investigation into the Titan sub, and so you'll want to make sure you check out those videos as well.
But let's see what updates we have here now on the investigation into the Champlain Tower South condo collapse. So, right here is the old warehouse, and they have to painstakingly move every single column and slab and load everything onto the trucks piece by piece, one at a time, folks. Look at that, and it's a lot of work. There's what it looked like inside the old warehouse. Everything was just piled up and cramped. That one goes, and then I'm.
And NIST was supervising everything during this entire operation. They had to move them a few pieces at a time into the new warehouse. And inside there, you know, you can see inside this warehouse. It's big and beautiful and spaced out. Everything's white and clean, and now you have enough room to spread everything out and do your work. You can get in between all of the pieces now.
Okay, so here we can see what the primary evidence facility number one looked like at the beginning. It's just a complete discombobulated mess here. And this is what it looked like when they were done. They started with this mess here, and now everything is all laid out nice and neat. So they still have the primary evidence facility number one here. Everything is just now reshuffled to this newer, neater layout now. And then you can start to bring in some of your more heavier equipment now.
Look at this. Am I the only one here that thinks that these two little rebar rods there were a little bit too close together? If your rebar rods are too close together, the concrete with the aggregate cannot flow properly between them. Now, two years ago, just a couple of weeks after the Champlain Towers condo collapse in Miami happened on June 4th, 2021, the Miami Herald published this article here where they had brought in some engineers to look at the floor plans of the Champlain Towers condo. And they were able to show us that in certain cases, there, there was overcrowding of the rebar rods in some of the columns.
So the Herald drew up several examples of where the reinforcement and connecting steel was all just kind of all bunched together like this and too close together. And when you have spaces that are too close, like closer than an inch, you can't get the concrete to pour effectively between them. Here's another design right here where they showed 16-inch columns in the tower where you can see that the amount of reinforcement rods that are in these columns, there's too many, and they take up more than 8% of the columns' total area, which is in violation of the codes at the time. And so the columns really should have probably been bigger.
Here's one column in particular, column I4, that they found where you have horizontal and vertical connection rods going through here of different types and sizes. And you can see there's just so many of them in there that you wonder how could they have even poured the concrete effectively. I will put a link to that Miami Herald story for you down in the video description below.
So NIST gave us this quick update that says they've got 40 employees working on it, 15 local and federal agencies, 20+ workers and contracts awarded, 600 pieces of evidence specimens, and they've got 24+ failure hypotheses going on right now. And then, of course, three plus terabytes of video. Now, they've blown through 78% of the money appropriated to them for this investigation so far. They just received an additional $40 million in additional funding for disaster supplemental appropriation. And hopefully, this will take them to the end of the investigation. And guess who's paying for all of this, folks? That's right, you and me through our tax dollars are paying for all of this.
And thank you, NIST. They finally answered my question, and I've been banging my fist on the tables since my video back in July 11th of 2021, just a couple of weeks after the condo collapse. You remember I was asking, where are the security camera videos? We've got cameras all over the place around the entire Champlain Towers property, and I showed you on that video and I showed you why. And I'll put a link to that video down below for you so you can go check it out.
So finally, NIST gave us a status on what's going on with this. And, and listen carefully because this is directly from their words during this meeting. And if I can, I'd like to just add one more detail as a non-project leader, but on behalf of my very good friend in the back. We wish that we had the DVR information from the security system too. That's a high wish list item. Why don't you have that? We have not been able to find it in any of the specimens during the extraction process. It wasn't identified. We've invested a lot of time and the project three, which Cam is leading, and he'll talk about that later. We've spent probably more than a hundred person hours searching for that within the debris that was extracted, both the evidentiary debris and non-evidential debris. And we've identified a few hard drives that could possibly have been part of the DVR and just took custody of those recently, and we'll be exploring that. But you'll hear more about that in just a little bit. Okay, I thought maybe there was some legal reason or something. No, no. If you don't have it, you know.
Now here they talk about it a little bit more later on in the meeting. Listen to this. We have also invested considerable effort into attempting to recover the DVR from the security camera system that was present in the building at the time of the collapse. Footage from multiple camera locations captured before and during the collapse, which may be stored on the DVR's hard drives, could shed light on the collapse timeline and progression and further prove or disprove certain failure hypotheses. We conducted multiple searches at MDPD facilities in Miami using aerial lifts, binoculars, cameras, drones, and close-up inspections to observe the movement of and search through the debris from the building stored at these facilities. Although we have not found the DVR itself, more than two dozen hard drives were found, and we have identified approximately 10 hard drives that may have come from a DVR. As Judy mentioned, we recently took custody of all recovered hard drives, which are now undergoing physical inspections to determine which ones will be subjected to detailed forensic data analysis.
Well, I sure hope they find something, and I hope those drives are indeed from the DVR. Now, here's where it starts to get really juicy, folks, because this is now where NIST is about to reveal to us some really good, juicy data here and some information that we didn't know about the design of the building. And NIST is also about to validate some of the claims that I made on some of my earlier videos, which a few people criticized me for being wrong, but it turns out here that I think I just might be right on these claims.
CAGlian Associates' work shows that the design of the structure of CTS failed to meet the codes and standards applicable at the time of original construction and would also not meet current codes and standards. The lack of code compliance under both original and current codes is most severe in the pool deck structure. The check of the tower part of the structure is ongoing final review and checking right now, so I'm not going to report on that. What they did was they examined the structural drawings to see if they were up to code. You know, here's the original code up here, see that? The ACI 318 from 1977. And they also compared it to the current code, and that was the ACI right here, the 318-19. So the latest revision was 2019. See all of these red areas in the pool deck area? These are the areas where it was weak. Now, the big red dots here mean these are the areas where the slab-column connections had the most severe degree of understrength. And then the arrows here mean that there was flexure. So that means in these areas here, there's a lot of flexure, meaning it's moving too much. This means that your slab is flexing too much, and that can also cause problems and it can cause punching shear as well. And then, of course, these yellow areas weren't quite so bad.
Now, if you remember, like, here's the pool right here on the lower right, and here's the building outline. So it was this part of the patio that actually survived, if you remember the pictures from the collapse. So that's what they were saying. And then when you have this, what they were talking about here, see this DCR of greater than 1.0? This is the demand capacity ratio. Let's say you have a column on your building, and the demand on it is one pound, and if that column can support one pound, then you have a demand capacity ratio that equals one. But if that column can only support a half a pound, that means that the demand over the capacity ratio is now going to be two, and that's bad. So you always want your DCR to be less than one. That's what they were talking about. Everything in this area, in this picture here, was over 1.0, and that's why they failed to meet the original codes even from 1981 when the building was built.
So if you remember on my original videos that I was uploading in the last year or two, I kept showing you this diagram that I'd built over time showing where all of the puddles of water were seen in the garage and all the repairs were made on the ceilings. You remember my hypothesis was that so either column L 11.1 failed first or column M 11.1 failed first. But this, this is that area shaded in yellow here that actually collapsed. So just like they said in the drawing where all of the arrows were, you can see how this is the part that survived. And then, of course, some people had even already stated before that they thought that the collapse may have started over here in the planter. Some people thought that it started back over here by this, back by the stairwell door. Other people, including the lawsuit, was alleging that the failure started here on the back wall in the most severe of these understrength areas. The strength provided by the design was only about half of that required by the original codes and standards. I'll repeat that. Only about half of that required by the original codes and standards. Holy cow, did you guys hear that? This is a game changer here.
And I'll tell you why. We know that in the past, a few other engineers have stated that they thought that the pool deck was probably somewhere near the maximum load capacity. And in fact, if you guys follow Josh Porter over at the Building Integrity channel, a few months after the collapse, he had done some loading analysis. All right, so when I ran the population for the punching shear around these 12-inch by 16-inch columns, I found that the, uh, that the slab was actually right at 100% load for punching shear, just due to the dead weight alone. But this is now double the load capacity. I've never heard any other engineer here or even mention that. So NIST has the advantage here because see, they have custody of all of the Champlain Towers condo collapse debris in that warehouse. We don't have access to that. They do. So they can go in and look at that slab and they can see that those rebar rods are in there buried too deep into the concrete, making it weaker. So they're able to take all of this information and, and they are now able to determine that this fails even the original building codes from 40 years ago by a factor of two. The strength provided by the design was only about half of that required by the original codes and standards for some of the lower level tower columns. The amount of steel reinforcement specified for those columns exceeded the maximum limits permitted by code for the particular column size. And this resulting overcrowding of steel in that column, we may well have complicated and made difficult the concrete placement and the consolidation of that concrete during original construction.
Now, I know what you're thinking right now. Dude, what about the Champlain Towers North condo? That's the sister building just a block off Collins Avenue there. Remember, both of these buildings have almost identical floor plans. And in fact, if you look at the garages of both of them, they're just about exactly the same. Even though Champlain Towers North condominium has two fewer condos per floor than Champlain Tower South, if they both have that same design and it looks like even the floor plans were the same between the both of them, from the same exact under design and safety factor, you know, then now you know by half. If I was those residents, I would be running pretty scared right now.
Now, they do have Alan Kilsheimer working for them over there, and they are in the process now, as you can see these pictures that were sent to me a few days ago. They are rebuilding all of their patio slabs over there. But what about the pool deck and the slab and the garage and everything else going on there? So I think Champlain Towers North could certainly benefit by installing capitals at the tops of all of their columns, as you see here in this picture. And also, if they added these drop panels around the tops of the columns here, like you see in this photograph right here. All of those will will serve to bolster the strength of these, and this will give them additional punching shear resistance because, as you can see by widening the top of the columns like this and adding those big thick drop panels there, what that does is it strengthens that tributary area around the column and floor slab connection right there.
Take a look at this. This is the Champlain Towers North pool deck and look how strikingly different it is from the South. Very few planters. And if you look at their tiles there, it looks like they're just simply mortared down. They're not sitting in a huge bed of really thick, super heavy sand like the Champlain Towers South. In the pool deck, we're primarily interested in this zone here between lines K and M and roughly between lines 9.1 and 15 on the structural drawings. The slab there is perhaps susceptible to, or was susceptible to, punching shear failures. It's lightly reinforced, it has design deficiencies and construction errors. It was heavily stressed and showed signs of deterioration. And so it's highly suspect that a failure initiation due to punching could have happened there.
So what NIST just said here actually vindicates what I'd been saying since the beginning because what he just said there was that they're focusing their efforts right now on K, which is right here. This is K through M, so this area here, and then all the way down from 9.1 here down to 15. So in this area is really where they're focusing their efforts. And as you know, that's where I had said originally that I think one of these two columns failed first. And remember the beam, the beams A's are connected here and here. So if one of these columns fails, it could rip out the beams A's, which already were under designed, leaving spindly columns right here, and then the building just collapses from there.
Complication of this slab stepping down from the tower into the pool deck area, this is especially in this zone right here along 9, 9.1, where the slab steps downward 18 inches in some locations. And this creates an area in which we've got beams with reentrant corners, reinforcement not covering the entire depth of the beam. It creates beam-column joints that are as deep as 27 inches, maybe without transverse reinforcement, and containing floor concrete which is weaker than the column concrete. So this creates a series of potential failure initiation places due to shear failure, failures, joint failures, and other things, especially considering the heavy loads that are supported there because of the planters.
We're also thinking about extraordinary loading such as a car striking a column in the basement, explosion in the basement, object that falls from the roof. But we have no evidence of any of those. We study them nonetheless. That's good news for those of our friends here who are conspiracy theorists. And believe me, I get quite a few of them. I've received so many complaints from people that they think that NIST lied about the 9/11 collapse. You know what causes a collapse there? Champlain Towers is no stranger to this type of conjecture. And so a lot of people think that, well, bombs were placed inside the building, and that's why the building collapsed. That somebody blew up the building. Other people think that somebody rammed a car into the column.
So it's good to hear that at least they're considering it and they'll look into it, but they have so far not found any evidence. While we're on the topic of cars, I just want to quickly show you this picture again of that Toyota Supra that was trapped underneath the rubble on the Champlain Tower South condo collapse. I probably got more comments about that photograph than anything else in the last two years of uploading videos. So many people lamenting about this rare Toyota Supra, the loss of this car because it was stuck there in that cavity, and unfortunately, there was no way to get it out of there. There was just no access to it. And so when they imploded the second part of the building, it got imploded right down on top of that car, and it was probably destroyed.
We're still exploring that two dozen failure hypotheses, roughly with a number of potential causes and contributors. But I am here to report that our analysis to date shows that even absent any sudden load or obvious initiator, sudden overload or obvious initiator of a failure on that tragic night of the collapse, the conditions that existed in the pool deck slab at that time represented a serious safety concern for the building. A margin of failure of zero means that failure is expected or it's imminent. Our work to date shows that under conditions that we believe to have been present at the time of the collapse, there were low margins of failure in parts of the CTS pool deck structure, very low. In some cases, there were multiple compounding factors that combined to create these low margins of safety. So they're sort of confirming here that just like with the Titanic, a big disaster like this is always made up of several smaller components that when added together, each of these potential failure modes adds together to cause that final engineering disaster. Here, there's usually not a single trigger event, it's usually multiple things coming together.
This coming up here is the first photographic evidence that NIST has given us that shows us proof that the rebar rods were buried too low into the concrete. The second factor reducing the margin against failure was improper replacement of the steel reinforcement in the pool deck slab during original construction. Our measurements of the pool deck slab specimens that we have stored in the warehouses show that typically the reinforcement in the top of the pool deck slab was placed lower than is was required by the design document. More specifically, the design documents show that the top of the top layer of that reinforcement was to be placed three-quarters of an inch down from the top surface of the slab. Our measurements show that it was typically and very commonly located about two inches down. Now, the placement of this top reinforcement in a flat plate structure is really critical in a pool deck. That displacement in the original construction significantly reduces the margin of safety, particularly in the punching shear areas.
So you've heard them say just how critical this is. It's a very common failure when they come to inspect and they look at your rebar rods before, for example, pouring a pool. And I've seen in the past where people failed inspection because they laid the rebar directly on the ground instead of offsetting it a little bit because your rebar is not supposed to be at the bottom of the concrete, it's supposed to be in the concrete a little bit. So that's why you use these standoffs that you see here on the picture.
A third factor involved heavy materials that were added to the pool deck. And Jonathan spoke in some detail about this. This slide shows that a line of added landscape planters near where the pool deck joins the building's tower up near the north side of the pool deck were not part of the building's original design. The upper left-hand image is one from the original architectural design drawings, and if you can see the detail in that red box there, there were no planters shown. The upper right Google Earth image shows a number of large planters. This is from an image taken in 2019. At one point in time, there were palm trees in those planter boxes, very large, some of them approaching three stories tall. The weight of those palm trees and the action of wind blowing on them could have damaged the slabs over the time that they were there. These extra loads further reduce the margins of failure in that region of the slab.
Now, this one definitely vindicates me on some of my earlier videos where you remember I talked about those palm trees and I mentioned how the added weight of the planters and the palm trees, plus the potential damage caused by driving heavy equipment onto that pool deck to lift up those palm trees and put them into the planters, how else do you think they got them in there? Plus, there's no way that they hand-walked a couple of thousand of those tiles onto that pool deck. Those things were probably driven on on large pallets and probably set down by a skid steer or something else or or a Bobcat or some other type of small equipment. It may not be the JLG 460 articulating boom lift that I showed on my picture here, but certainly they had to have used something. And I stand by my argument because now, in light of this under-designed pool deck and all of that bad concrete there, and it's right in that area, I think this was a contributing factor for sure.
I did take some criticism from one of the other YouTube channels, and you guys know who he is. He's that narcissist guy out there that he has an elevated sense of importance where he thinks that he's the only one that has all the answers and all the rest of us are stupid. And he's even insulted me, called me tool boy or whatever. You know, this is what happens when you don't have the facts and when you lack understanding of construction sites. He also told me I was basically stupid for even suggesting that any equipment was brought onto the pool deck because he's like, you can't fit it in there past the gate. Well, take a look at this picture right here. This to me looks like it's a double gate here, a double wide gate.
Factor four is an additional added weight to the pool deck slab. It shows at one location in the pool deck nine inches of setting sand in a setting bed was added during a renovation. The middle image, taken by the same structure specialist, shows a location near the swimming pool where there was also a setting bed, nine inches thick. And it appears that some, if not all, of that material was added in a renovation. During the renovation, one and a quarter inches of new plant, new pavers and a sand bed was added with a waterproofing layer on top of the existing tile and mortar. So these additional loads even further reduced the margins against failure. So this is just mind-boggling how much sand and extra materials there were there on that pool deck.
Now, I had showed you on my video videos a couple of years ago right after the collapse how I showed how adding those extra tiles onto the pool deck along with the sand would trap water after it rained. So now you have the added weight of the water soaking up and saturating that sand. Okay, what I didn't know was I thought the sand was only a couple of inches. This is all we do when we do pavers down here in Florida. As we pack them at two inches. These guys had nine inches of sand in some places. And one thing we didn't know because we didn't have access to the site like NIST does, is they put some of the new pavers on top of some of the old pavers in some of the areas of the pool deck. So the old pavers that had been mortared down into place. So they probably just didn't feel like chipping them up. But that is just crazy. And you know what? It's so easy to Monday quarterback this. Go, why didn't these people know? You know what? When you're dealing with contractors like this, the guys that are actually doing the work don't really know much of anything. They just, they're laborers, that's all they do. They know how to move materials from here to there. They probably didn't even know that they were sitting on top of a garage. That's the thing. You can do this all day long on the ground, but if they had known that they were on top of a garage, they probably would have thought things out differently.
Factor five here is deterioration that we're we're exploring. We see that some of the reinforcing steel in the pool deck exhibits corrosion to various degrees, ranging not infrequently from zero to very minor corrosion to areas where spots where the corrosion is more pronounced. Now, this is doing something here, and I don't know if it's intentional or not, but every time they keep showing us these random photographs, they all end up sort of being from this area that I've been showing you over and over again near M 11.1. So, for example, he had this slide up here, and I zoomed in on it here for you. He is showing us the corrosion on the rebar rods coming out of the top there. So these hooks, there, those were hooked into these concrete slabs that pulled right out of them. You see that column has a number 28 on it. So when we go back to my trusty map that I have made, you remember that said 28 on there for space number 28. So here's 26, 27, yeah. So when we look up where space 28 is, it's right here. Mostly likely it's either this column or this column. I'm going to go ahead and say that it's this column because again, we seem to keep focusing right into this area. And it's no surprise that they are showing that column right there, which I think is M 11.1. And if that's correct, they're saying that it has corrosion coming out of those hooks there that go into the slab. And so now that's where beam A is connected here. And so if they had bad corrosion in there, as well as all of the other things going wrong, it very well could be that M 11.1 is where it collapsed. So it could be they're giving us some clues here and showing us some random photographs, not realizing that they're letting the cat out of the bag.
Next, he's going to talk to us about the Miami Herald article that showed some cracks on the planter there in the pool deck. So in May of 2022, the Miami Herald ran an article showing cracks and other distress in some of the planter walls that bound the west side of the pool deck. And you can see that by the red arrow on the image on the upper left here. Um, that article contains a photo of that pool deck taken in early June of 2021, just about three days before the failure. But to the left of column K 13.1, there was a very abrupt and severe distress in the form of some rotation and a vertical displacement between the planter wall and the planter box right there. And this distress is consistent with unusually large slab deflections. And in fact, the slab-column connection at this line K, point 13.1 here, by our calculations, had one of the lowest margins of safety against failure in all of the pool deck.
Now, when I checked online here to see who they awarded the contract to, you can see it went to CAGlian Associates here, and the government description was code checks, support services for the Champlain Towers South, and they were awarded $272,000. Man, I would have done that for $100K. And just as a reminder, make sure you binge-watch all of the videos that we've uploaded here on the Champlain Towers collapse. You'll also want to view all of those videos that we uploaded on the Titan submarine implosion, there are probably at least a half a dozen of them. You definitely don't want to miss those. Those are some really juicy ones filled with some great detail.
So what we did here today was we took about five hours worth of testimony and crammed it into just a few minutes here. There was a lot of details, a lot of stuff to get out, but I hope I made it crystal clear for you exactly what's happening. And I feel very confident now. I'm very relieved that NIST is finally starting to give us more of what we want, more of the answers. And we're getting close to the answer. Also, for next week, we're working on another video on the Champlain Tower South condo collapse where we're looking at what the condo association, they hired a structural engineer last year to defend them in the lawsuit. So they hired them to do to figure out what was the root cause. And I'm going to show you some pretty revealing details from them as well. So thank you so much for joining us, folks, and we'll see all of you on the next one.