Something That I Do Not Understand

For five years until this past March I served on our condominium association's board in Florida, including three years as its president. During this time we had to oversee a major waterproofing project on the pool deck.

For this reason the shocking and tragic news of the building collapse in Surfside, Florida, just north of Miami Beach, hit me harder than it otherwise might have. We do not yet know what happened, and I certainly won't speculate here at this time, but the actions of the building's condominium association are already receiving close scrutiny from the media and from government authorities. 

I feel for those condo board members. It is a largely thankless job to serve on a condo board and yet I have always thought of it as the smallest possible manifestation of our democratic system. You are elected by a majority of the individual unit owners in a building. You represent everyone's best interests to the best of your abilities. You volunteer your time (meaning you are not getting paid for your service). You try to do the right thing with the limited resources you have. And you certainly hope and trust that nothing like what just happened could ever happen. And it almost never does.

Here is something that I do not understand.

Having traveled all over the world, I have seen buildings like this one in countless places that have far less stringent building codes (and less money for maintenance). Places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia, even India. Sometimes the buildings are nestled into steep hillsides that get massive amounts of rain, sometimes they are along the water or built on land artificially reclaimed from the sea. There must be millions of buildings like this around the world.

But we do not see buildings coming down left and right every other week. It does happen but very, very, very rarely. I just looked it up and found this compilation of structural failures (on Wikipedia) from all over the world going back more than 100 years. Almost all building collapses with significant loss of life happened during construction, during earthquakes, or as a result of terrorist attacks (e.g., the World Trade Center).

I suspect that we do not yet know the whole story here and something will come to light to offer an explanation. In the meantime we should all keep in mind the families that have been so tragically impacted by something that no one saw coming.