Please help me understand this. I have seen excerpts from this report before and remember thinking that the wording “must be repaired in a timely fashion” does not quite convey the urgency of “this building is coming down in the next five years unless you STOP EVERYTHING AND FIX THIS.”
I also note that they point out that the leaks caused by the messed up repairs may cause cars to have to be repainted. Again, not quite the same thing as “this building’s coming down on top of all those cars and you won’t have to worry about paint anymore, ever.”
Is this a red button letter to anyone who is not a structural engineer? Shouldn’t they have been more explicit about what the danger actually was?
Not every engineer sends RED BUTTON letters. So, Boards have to read between the lines on these things. That is why everyone involved has insurance.
Look, the main driver here is money. Let’s be blunt. The Association had just qualified for a $12 million line of credit. But the association has no collateral to pledge aside from the income generated by its assessments. So, it was going to levy a special assessment (whether it needed membership approval is unknown). That assessment was going to be anywhere between $80K to $200K per Unit (all this has been publicly reported). So, what do you do if you need a membership vote and they say “no” (seen that happen). What do you do if the members don’t have the money (many of these owners were retirees)? These are not easy questions. What caused the problem was a lack of fiscal planning. The association likely had inadequate reserves to run a high-rise next to the ocean. Why? Because no one wants to vote for raising assessments to fund reserves for something in the future (its an issue with short-term thinking).
It puzzles me that the report starts by discussing problems with leaky windows and some other minor things before getting to the “major” issues with waterproofing and bungled previous repairs and the troubles with concrete in the parking garage that seemed more urgent, at least to us now. If the engineer at the time really thought these were “red button” issues, wouldn’t they have been covered first and with stronger language?
I don’t know, nothing surprises me anymore. I saw a presentation on the collapse of the pedestrian bridge in Florida. Apparently the engineers saw major cracking, but everyone brushed it off. The presenter showed photographs of the cracking. Any structural engineer worth his or her salt could’ve seen that they were very, very serious cracks.
Yes, it’s kind of wrapped around with less urgent stuff. As a lawyer (not in the US) I’d consider a report like this that is to be read by laypeople (the board of the HOA) first way too wishy washy.
The engineers have to be sure their intended audience understand the priority and risk involved in the various problems cited in the report. Most of the board and HOA are likely NOT structural engineers and have no good ability to weigh the things that URGENTLY need attention vs “nice to have.”
As a lay person reading the report, I’m not given the impression that the building is at great risk of collapsing in the very near future if A, B, and C aren’t done within xy time. Boards and HOA have to “herd cats” to get agreement on what repairs to make, which firm to hire, what funds to use. If there aren’t funds, special assessments are needed and they have to be collected.
It does seem odd to me. The engineer buries the major structural issues towards the end of the report. I feel that the wording clearly indicates major work needed to be performed but I would have put this at the beginning of the report and emphasized how urgent it was. I’m not impressed with the report overall. It’s skimpy for a building this large. Of course, the engineer could have been given a skimpy budget. That happens a lot. It’s why most construction documents these days are of poor quality.
I have a suspicion that this firm was given a tiny budget. From the report structure, it possible that the writer worked from the top down and outside in, staring with windows etc. and going down into the parking garage. Regarding putting the bigger issue first, readers generally tend to remember the last thing they read, so maybe that is the reason. I also wonder if the report was sent as an attachment in an email or with a letter emphasizing the most important issues.
(When we were buying our current house, the inspector wrote the report in the sequence she saw things, did not add special flags or bold print, but in her email, she suggested seriously looking at a specific structural issue, which we then did).
That’s surprising to me. We always keep in mind that our audience is made up of laypeople and stress things that are important. The order that we observe elements of a house is secondary.
That’s why she made big emphasis on the important things in her email which had the report as an attachment. That’s why I am wondering - was there a letter that accompanied the report?
Just this incident makes it clear why things should be highlighted in the report itself. It’s the report that has the engineer’s PE stamp on it, not the accompanying letter.
We’ve been practicing for 35 years and have learned that communication is everything. A lot of our job is education, not just engineering analysis and design. We repeat ourselves in reports and letters. I’m proud that we’ve never been sued or even had to go to mediation. That’s pretty amazing for structural engineers.
I wonder if there was even an element of “magical thinking” at work here. All the whisper down the lane of, “well, a building built using modern techniques (i.e. not historical) is secure! This is the US - buildings just don’t collapse here like they do in developing countries with fewer resources!”
Also, we recently had a building inspection of a house we are contemplating buying and it was more thorough than any gyn exam I’ve had. The report was about 70 pages long and the “executive summary” listed certain items as Red, Yellow, or Green, depending on how urgent they were to fix. Then the report described each system in detail about what could go wrong in the future and how to best maintain the system.
I feel, even as a lay person (former construction lender), that I can adequately say what I need to do before moving in, and what tradespeople I need to call immediately. I cannot imagine ignoring a report with any language about structural problem, even as non-urgent as this report may have sounded.
@Peruna1998 raised interesting issues.
Did the HOA bring this huge assessment up for a vote of the homeowners? If so, what was the vote?
How much insurance did the HOA have? What insurance did members of the board have? Are those members still alive?
How many of the condos were being rented out to someone other than the homeowners? Were those renters killed? Then the homeowner may have a huge liability to those to whom they rented.
Did the contractors who assessed the poor state of the building warn adequately that the structure may fail?
I don’t know Florida law but most states have a statute of limitations for the liability of builders for building problems. (The original builder, I mean).