Video released by a team of federal investigators reportedly shows more evidence of extensive corrosion and overcrowded concrete reinforcement in a South Florida condo that collapsed in June, killing 98 people.
The footage was released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on the same day it announced the team that will conduct its investigation at the Champlain Towers South, led by Judith Mitrani-Reiser, a Cuban-born engineer who grew up in Miami, the Miami Herald reported.
Still frames of debris pictured in the video show densely packed steel reinforcement in various elements of the building, as well as extensive corrosion where one column met the building’s foundation, the news outlet reported.
“The corrosion on the bottom of that column is astronomical,” engineer Dawn Lehman, professor of structural engineering at the University of Washington, told the Herald, adding the sheer amount of corrosion should have been obvious and documented as part of the 40-year inspection underway when the building collapsed June 24.
“If there’s that amount of corrosion, this should have been fixed,” she told the Herald.
The images show beams, walls and columns that appear to be overcrowded with steel reinforcement, which suggests potential weaknesses, she told the news outlet.
"There is no reason there should be that kind of bar congestion," Lehman said.
The risk posed by "congested" vertical rebar in columns would have been even worse in spots where the rebar overlapped, which is known as "lap splice" regions, Abieyuwa Aghayere, a Drexel University engineering researcher who also reviewed the video, told the news outlet.
While it's already congested with rebar, at the splice regions, it would have been "even further congested," Aghayere told the Herald.
He also told the news outlet he was struck by how "powdery" and white the concrete in columns appeared in the newly released video. Stone-like aggregates used to strengthen concrete during construction typically remain visible but they were not in the images from the collapse site.
"The white color just stuns me," Aghayere told the newspaper. He added that instead of seeing aggregate material mixed into the concrete, "it's just homogenous," which is likely indication of saltwater damage.
He said it is impossible to tell from just the images whether the concrete used in original construction was weaker than the designs called for, or whether the apparent weakness was due to damage over time.
"It doesn't look like normal concrete to me. What's going on?" Aghayere said.
When specialists drilled holes into the concrete of the still standing structure in order to place explosives used in the controlled demolition, they revealed the Champlain Towers concrete was “soft, really soft,” according to an interview in the Wall Street Journal.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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