The city of Surfside, in North Miami Beach, hired Allyn Kilsheimer, a renowned structural engineer who investigated the attacks of 11 – S to find the causes of the collapse of the Champlain Towers condominium, the past 24 June.
A section of 12 floors of the condominium that contained 55 apartments collapsed within seconds, leaving numerous victims and 145 missing people. So far they have recovered 18 bodies, but authorities still hope to find survivors.
Kilsheimer’s company , KCE Structural Engineers of Washington DC, has conducted the forensic study of more than 100 incidents of structural collapses and natural disasters or those caused by man requiring emergency support, stabilization, demolition or rebuilding.
Since the time of the Surfside tragedy, it has been noted the age of the building – 53 years- the subsidence and porosity of the land where it was built, the deterioration of the foundations due to saline water, in addition to design failures and structural damage mentioned in a report by 2018 as possible causes of d
Based on his experience, Kilsheimer does not believe that a single condition was the cause of the collapse and that any option of causality is possible .
What we are trying to find is a “trigger”, the trigger that triggered the collapse, explained the engineer to the US public radio station (NPR).
“I conceive some 20 or 30 things I think might have caused something like that, ”Kelsheimer said. “We generally generate more ideas as we discover things.”
- The video showing debris and water in the garage of the building in Miami minutes before it collapsed
- How Miami Beach was built by gaining ground from the sea in a swampy area (and the risks that this implies for the future)
With your team, you will analyze concrete, reinforced steel, foundations, soil composition, and building design. This last step includes the compilation and study of the drawings and plans, as well as the computerized models of how the structure should behave .
“ There hasn’t been a single building he’s been involved in, which are probably about 40, where there are no mistakes that were made during construction, ”he told NPR.
However, he noted that despite any of those mistakes that may have been made, the building stood for 40 years. So something triggered the disaster.
“The idea is to find the trigger or at least reduce it to two or three possible triggers and start to see … if this single error had not been the fault, still it could have been the trigger that caused the problem ”, he concluded.
With their 80 year-old Allyn Kilsheimer has been working in the engineering field since 1959. On 1968 founded his company KCE Structural Engineers which specializes, among other things, in emergency forensic engineering investigations, failure analysis, reconstruction and recovery of structures .
Has carried out research and emergency stabilization work all over the world, including Latin America, but the most prominent work has been the so-called Phoenix Project, to rebuild the Pentagon , after the September attacks 11 from 2001.
KCE was cont rated for the rescue and emergency recovery of the part of the building destroyed in the attack, which it rebuilt in a year.
Since then the company has been called upon to investigate and analyze structural failures, operation or deterioration of important buildings, such as the Ford Field stadiums in Detroit, Michigan, Miller Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Nationals Park in Washington DC.
In September 2015, was hired to provide urgent services of stabilization and sanitation advice of a deep fault zone on the outskirts of Mexico City .
The commission to analyze the collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside is not the only one for which it has been hired in Florida.
In March of 2018, was in charge of investigating the collapse of a pedestrian bridge of 53 meters at Florida International University (FIU), in Miami . A landslide that claimed six lives and left 10 wounded.
In addition to the investigation carried out by the Allyn Kilsheim firm, there are two others that are being carried out simultaneously, an analysis by the National Institute of Standards and Technology initiated and another by the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office.
There has also been a series of private investigations that are carried out with motives to support the expected legal demands .
It is not expected that there will be definitive results of any of these investigations before several months.
- Fights, complaints and fury of residents: claims filed by collapse survivors
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