Dust thou art, and unto Dust shalt thou return. The Collapse of Concrete Buildings
We don’t know yet what could be the causes of the recent collapse of the condo building in Surfside, Florida. But it is likely that the corrosion of the reinforced concrete was one of the main reasons that weakened the structure of the building. It is a subject that I described in one of the chapter of my book “Before the Collapse” (Springer 2018) that turns out to have been timely and, unfortunately, also prophetic. We may see many more of these collapses in the future
Extract from Chapter 3.1 of “Before the Collapse” (2019) by Ugo Bardi
In the late morning of August 14, 2018, I was busy writing this book when I happened to open my browser. There, I saw the images of the collapse of the Morandi bridge, in Genoa, almost in real time. It was a major disaster: the bridge used to carry more than 25 million vehicles per year and it was a vital commercial link between Italy and Southern France. When it collapsed, it not only took with it the lives of 43 people who were crossing it, but it was nothing less than a stroke for the Italian highway system, forcing the traffic from and to France to take a long detour. It will take years before a new bridge can be built and the economic damage has been incalculable.
How could it happen that the engineers who took care of the maintenance of the highway could not predict and contrast the collapse of such an important structure? Much was said in the debate that followed about incompetence or corruption. Perhaps the fact that maintenance of the highway was handed over to a profit-making company was a recipe for disaster: profit-maximizing may well have led to cutting corners in the maintenance tasks…
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