"Greg Batista, a professional engineer from Davie who specializes in concrete repair projects, said that after watching the Surfside condo tower collapsing to rubble in online videos, one potential structural flaw jumped out at him.
“Concrete spalling.” Here’s what it means.
Batista said that when salt water seeps into porous concrete, it causes the reinforced steel rods known as rebar in the support beams to rust and expand. In turn, the expansion breaks up the concrete and that weakens the beams.
It’s like “concrete cancer” spreading, said Batista, who worked on the planter boxes on the pool deck at the Champlain Towers South Condo building in 2017.
“Once the cancer spreads, the concrete breaks up and becomes weaker and weaker as time goes on,” Batista said. “My best guess is that’s what happened here. This building has a garage on the lower floors. If you have one column subjected to spalling, the no. 1 suspect here, it could fail. That one beam could bring down the whole building like a domino effect.”
“If you have one column subjected to spalling, the no. 1 suspect here, it could fail. That one beam could bring down the whole building like a domino effect.”
I don’t know much about construction engineering, but I think that more redundancy than that should be required. A large building that can be brought down by just one failing beam should never have been built.