I've been pondering something for the past few days that might seem like I'm being faux naive or something, but here it is anyway: Why has the Florida condo collapse gotten so much news coverage for so long?
Obviously this was a newsworthy event. That's not what I'm talking about. But it strikes me as the kind of thing that would normally get three or four days of coverage and then fade away. Instead, it's been front-page news for a solid two weeks now. Why?
I can't come up with an answer. Is it a bigger deal than I think? Is it due to lack of news in other quarters? Or does it say something about our collective fear that the United States is falling apart?
Maybe I'm just inventing something that isn't there, but it seems like the condo collapse has seized our attention far more than other, similar disasters. Is it simply the fear of sudden death in a place we normally consider 100 percent safe? Or what?
Any ideas?
Biden's big infrastructure bill was in the news at the same time, so that might be part of it. The idea of first responders "racing" to find survivors of course draws media like moths to a porchlight. And then of course there's the fact that the whole disaster seems like a microcosm of America's domestic politics at the moment: everythings falling apart; one faction sounds the alarm and wants to do something, but another, louder, whinier faction says it's "too expensive" and what do experts know anyway, and everything devolves into recriminations and sniping and then the thing falls down and kills everyone.
Two reasons. First, the same reason that people are more afraid of plane crashes that kill a couple hundred people at once, even if lately they only happen once a decade in the US, while ignoring tens of thousands of road accident fatalities. They think they have some control when driving, but when in a plane they have zero control.
Second, novelty: mass shootings are killing thousands of people per year, but they have become desensitized to that. A high rise collapse that takes out over 100 people in the blink of an eye is a new things in the US, just like September 11 was. Even though it killed only 1/20th as many people, there are millions of Americans living in such buildings. The thought that their lives could suddenly end while sleeping peacefully in their beds must be terrifying.
Although shootings kill thousands of Americans each year, mass shootings do not. The WaPo shows 51 mass shooting deaths for the year through May 21, and past years show similar numbers. Thousands die in the daily, one-or-two-at-a-time shootings in black and brown neighborhoods, but those don't get much press coverage.
It was less surprising to me just because I follow the British press a bit and the Grenfell Tower has been in the news massively more than would seem objectively reasonable.
I can’t think of a similar disaster in the United States….the sudden collapse of a large building killing 100+ people (i remember a bridge collapse several years ago in Minneapolis and a few decades ago a walkway collapsed at a hotel in Kansas City, but nothing like this). There are tens of thousands of similar buildings in the country which makes people nervous and no one believes every one of those buildings meet code or codes are enforced. The building was on the coast, so fears of rising seas could be playing a role in public concern as a harbinger of the future. And, as you said, this fits into the country-is-falling-apart narrative. So, just s perfect storm of many things tying into overall anxiety in the country.
I believe you have nailed it Typhoon. It's all about failing America, a fear that you will go to bed one night and never wake up in the pile of rubble you end up in.
All the previous suggestions make sense. But I've been wondering about the question myself with regard to "myself" — I've followed the story very closely and I've never really understood why. I just mentioned this to someone yesterday.
If I may, it's grabbed national attention because it represents a previously blind risk that has a lot of people set up for exposure in places where the majority of Americans live, the coasts.
Within one week, Americans had their vocabulary expanded by several new words and phrases-- punching shear, spalling, shear wall, pile foundation -- while some spent time trying to read structural and architectural drawings, applying their newfound expertise to interpret the cause of the structural collapse. Some even ventured to put 2 and 2 together to assert that limestone karsts were undoubtedly an issue, particularly given the *shocking* 2mm land subsidence. In which case, my god y'all, half of Seattle and San Francisco is about to collapse any day, now!
Anyway, people saw the same signs in their buildings and are panicked, seeing how there were very limited signs of impending catastrophic failure, but the early signs are seen everywhere in many buildings all along the coast.
There hasn't been a similar disaster, not since the interstate bridge collapse in Minnesota some years ago.
Number 1: No Trump tweets to dissect.
Number 2: It is a strange and hopefully one-off sort of disaster.
Number 3: Sharks have been less bitey.
No shark attacks and/or missing young white women.
150 people died. That’s a lot of people. There really aren’t a lot of disasters where numbers are anything like that happening in the US.
Last January, over 3000 people a day were dying of Covid in the US.
Yes but those don’t count because we can’t see those deaths on TV. Perhaps because of HIPAA, there has been very little footage of packed hospitals with lots of dead or dying people all over them. At most you get a Concerned Doctor or Nurse standing in front of a hospital admonishing us to wear masks, get vaxxed, etc. which is nowhere near as enthralling to watch on TV as a Collapsed High Rise in a Wealthy Country.
i believe i heard something about that in newspapers and on tv.
Commenters on conservative sites routinely say they were over 60 so they don't count.
What everyone else says, plus volume of news coverage tends to get driven by how *long* there's stuff to report on. The fact that rescue efforts (or at this point, I guess, body recovery efforts) have taken so long mean there's something for news reporters to check in on every day, which means they have a hook to repeat the story.
Had this been a gas-leak or something with an equal body-count but quicker resolution, I suspect it've ended up being less of a story.
Yes, and unlike a gas-leak, we do not know what happened. Lots of speculation, and daily reports of condo meetings, etc., also keep it "news worthy".
Building demolitions always get coverage. And an emergency demolition in the face of a hurricane increases the chance that it goes spectacularly wrong. And the fact that there was so much video of the building coming down makes it better for tv and the internet. Who can;t be fascinated by the one edge of the building hanging on for a while before also coming down.
I think if the condo were in, say, Topeka, it would generate less sustained interest. But Florida has a weird appeal, and I'll speculate that that is because (1) so much weird human behavior seems to go on there and (2) it's a place many people from all around the country contemplate retiring to.
Yeah, I had the same thought. Many people in DC/NYC vacation Florida, including airbnbs at beach-side condos. So it’s more “real” than a bridge collapse in the Midwest or a heatwave in the pacific NW. East coast bias mainly.
No more weird human behavior happens in Florida than anywhere else. It just gets reported more. I could not be more tired of this "everyone in Florida is on meth and wrestling an alligator" nonsense. It's amazing to me that reasonable people actually believe it's true.
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody mentioned that it was captured on video. If it hadn't been, and all TV news had to show was before/after shots, would we still be watching?
Boeing 737 Max. The number of people killed would have made it a news story for a few days.
What made it so important was the "tip of the iceberg" it revealed--a shocking disregard for safety traded off for profits. That was an issue for a LONG time, with a lot of coverage, because it made us realize how helpless we are to control our own destiny when we depend on the people we trust to obey the laws we make to protect ourselves from preventable disasters, and then those people betray our trust for money.
I have Consumer Reports as well as the NHTSA to help me pick which car to buy, considering safety as well as economy, performance, and comfort. Who will protect me from malfeasance in civil and structural engineering, if not the laws we pass plus the inspectors we hire to assess the conformance to those laws?
That’s unpossible because Libertarians tell us that the Free Market would never allow a company to sell something for very long that is deadly or harmful. Shame and lawsuits are supposed to drive it out of business before it can harm too many consumers.
/s
Profits? This was a condo. The residents of the building owned the building. If they (or their elected board) skimped on maintenance, it wasn't for the sake of "profits."
Boeing 737's were not condos. Boeing traded off safety for profits. The issue it revealed was that we trusted people we counted on to follow the laws and protect our safety. Same issue in the condo. Same result.
If you want to focus on the word "profit," then think of it this way:
On the books, you have revenue and you have expenses. The difference (revenue minus expenses) is called "profit." And if expenses exceed revenue, then it's called "loss." In a non-profit organization, they may use a different name for the "profit" side (think "accrual to reserves,") but the calculation is the same, and the word "loss" is still the same.
That's a weird use of the word "profit." If you met someone who said, "I don't go to the doctor because the $50 co-pay is too expensive," you wouldn't tell him that he was putting "profit" above his health.
Very good points Ken, this was a scenario that millions of condo dwellers across the US never thought could happen. Now they are probably awake with worry over the conditions of the building they live in older buildings/cheaply constructed buildings.
How could this happen? It's a mystery where pieces of answers come out every few days, and we are expecting more. Everyone's eager to learn about how they might be more alert and able to react when they encounter hazards where they are.
Not sure how you’re supposed to be alert and ready to react when your home suddenly collapses, especially if you’re asleep but also even if you’re awake. The time to do something about that risk was likely months ago at a condo or HOA board meeting.
Yes, but it's coming out that they knew this was coming but were unable to do anything because some of the residents didn't want to pay for the repairs.
Right, there were hazards to be seen a long time ago, and some people could have been more alert. This is interesting to read about.
I would say the reason is that they haven't found all the bodies, nor have they declared the search over, and as long as that's true, it still remains a live news story.
+1 Exactly.
All of the above and because the majority of victims are still buried in the rubble and Americans have some weird fixation with recovering meat sacks. Plus now oncoming hurricane which adds a bit of juice to a story that might have waned.
My wife, who hates most news, has been following the collapse very closely. Maybe the story strikes a chord with low news consumers.
Partly, because it’s a genuine nightmare. One moment you’re safe and sound. Next minute you’re in the abyss.
But I also think that this tragedy is almost subconsciously understood as a harbinger of the climate change apocalypse. People understand the danger but because it’s sort of creeping up on us, it’s in a deep background that isn’t immediately frightening. This is very tangible in ways that extreme weather event are not.
But also, because of the way in which places like Miami are built, it’s entirely possible that there’s simply no way to protect these cities and building collapses are likely to become routine events in the decades to come. At the same time, there’s a feeling of inevitability to climate change because we can’t defeat the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists.
The short term benefits for these people are considerable and the likelihood of any serious consequences are nil. There’s so much money on the table. So the lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians cannot resist.
That's my feeling as well. Anyone buying oceanfront property in Florida right now is an idiot. Miami's streets are routinely flooded now just by tides and sea-level rise, to say nothing of a big storm surge when a hurricane lands. I can't see how most tall buildings, to say nothing of ones built 40-50 years ago or longer, can survive that for too long.
I might, perhaps, concede that the changing climate accelerated things for this building, but everything reported suggests it was not properly maintained over many years for the otherwise normal conditions of a building by the seaside. Steel-reinforced concrete and sea air are not a good combination. Especially if waterproofing isn't properly maintained.
There is a real danger that when everything is caused by climate change, nothing will be.
I would agree that you make valid points, particularly about being careful to not attribute failures of routine property maintenance to climate change. I think you’re particularly right to point that out as regards the issues of corrosion and waterproofing.
But it’s also true that this building seems to have been the unlucky point of convergence for other trends related to climate change which very likely exacerbated the problems of poor maintenance and poor construction. Miami seems particularly, almost uniquely, vulnerable to climate change.
The reality is that even a well designed, well built, and well maintained building is going to be vulnerable to rising seas if it’s built on limestone or barely above sea-level. And there’s significant reason to believe that both of those factors also contributed heavily to the building’s collapse.
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/miami-condo-collapse-prompts-questions-climate-change
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/06/25/rising-sea-levels-condo-collapse/
For many years now our news organizations have put inordinate energy into the packaging of larger news stories. They think out a title, make some identifying graphics, and then devote a specific, reoccurring segment of the news stream to covering it. Such things become little shows within the show, which like a regular TV series, attains a fixed place in the "lineup" until some other event comes along.
In this case I think, beyond the unusual size of the disaster and its implications for similar coastal buildings, that the initially small number of corpses found helped maintain an illusory hope that survivors could still be found. On the ground there has also been a clear reluctance to declare the search to be over, which normally would give the news organizations a point of closure for the coverage.
"If it bleeds, it leads", and it's a break from 1/6/21, COVID, China, politics in general. Also, buildings don't fall down all that often.
There's probably a lot of reasons but the biggest ones are (a) a building of this size has never spontaneously collapsed in the USA before, AFAIK, and (b) most of the people in the building are still "missing". And it appears that the remains of the building are going to be demolished without bothering to try and locate the rest of the bodies.
That last is incorrect. There were no personnel in the remaining standing units when they imploded them. The way they did the implosion was very carefully planned to reduce the stresses on the structural parts that were trapped in the no-man's land between the standing part and the fallen part. This provided a major advantage to the personnel trying to search the ruins of the fallen part.
The company that did that implosion is VERY good at what they do.
Because we do not know the cause of the collapse. Every tall building in the country is suspect until we know. A lot of people spend a lot of time in tall buildings.
All the above, plus elements basic to TV coverage: dramatic visuals, and abundant chances to highlight the human interest/poignancy of it. These give networks the platform to bring out the other intersections, whether wittingly or not.
The numbers of individuals and families affected, the diversity of their backgrounds, and the reach and density of those affected at second- and third-hand have vastly expanded the range of human interest coverage possible over other things I can think of, like the MN bridge collapse, or Waco, or even most mass shootings. Even Las Vegas. Those things were one-and-done rather than an ongoing process that provides the backdrop for extending the coverage.
Also, the it-could-happen-to-anyone factor, the question how much we really know about the buildings we trust ourselves to, is vastly compounded because of sustained campaigns against expertise, and by a lot of evidence that our normal bureaucratic procedures haven't been working so well.
Emerging stories about the condo board running into resistance from residents over the cost of fitness repairs, and the city-hired engineer who told residents everything was just peachy (if I have that one right), are really bringing out that last point.
A lot of tendencies converge to make for this continued attention. The usual pattern is that stories fade after two weeks. We'll see whether this one breaks the mold.
A high rise collapsing? What would be "similar disasters"? I can't think of any (except for war time bombings from the air).
High rises do not collapse. I can't remember a single case of a tall building spontaneously collapsing.
"I can't remember a single case of a tall building spontaneously collapsing."
It happens all too often in Bangladesh, where it's cheaper and easier to add stories to an already tall building than to try to acquire urban land to build a new one. Building codes? Engineers? (snort)
"High rises do not collapse. I can't remember a single case of a tall building spontaneously collapsing."
Google "Skyline Towers." After at least ten returns for cites that offer rentals there, you will find a little blurb that says "Related Search -- Skyline Towers Collapse."
It was 26 stories, under construction and half done, when part of it collapsed, killing 14 workers and injuring dozens more. Construction was halted, but amazingly it was subsequently completed and is still owned and operated as a luxury high-rise apartment building.
Buildings under constrction collapsing is not unheard off. But a finished building with residents sleeping is a unique event.
That was in the 1970s and the buildings were not yet occupied huge, major difference. It was huge news around here (I live about 6-7 miles away from Skyline Towers) when I was a kid but not nearly the as much coverage as when hurricane Agnes destroyed the dam at Lake Barcroft and caused devastating flooding in the city of Fairfax.
I'm with memyselfandi, an occupied building collapsing is a much, much bigger deal.
How long was the MN bridge collapse a newstory
A. Because all of the above, especially (1) the high death toll, and (2) the lingering hope for finding survivors (see Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" from 70 years ago for how the media does it).
B. Because this is a one-of-a-kind disaster. Buildings catch fire (every so often) and are targets of terrorist attacks (rarely) but they just don't collapse for no good reason. That's certainly not supposed to happen in non-"shithole" countries* and if did happen here, what does that make us?
C. Because many people have an HOA horror story in their past, and among other things this is an HOA horror story to top all others.
* Exc. fires & terror attacks, the list of large building collapses is short:
--Savar garment factory, Bangladesh, 2013 (8 floors, 1129 died)
--Sampoong dept. store, South Korea, 1995 (5 floors, 502 died)
--Thane bldg., India, 2013 (7 floors, 74 died)
--Ronan Point, U.K., 1968 (22 floors, 4 died)
Elsewhere, bldgs. under construction or partial collapses:
--L'Ambiance Plaza, Conn., 1986 (16 floors, 28 construction workers died)
--Ford Theater (disaster strikes again!), DC, 1893 (3 floors, 22 clerks died)
--Versailles wedding hall, Israel, 2001 (4 floors, 23 died)
To describe Ronan point as collapse in the same sense as the miami building is belied by the point that they were able to fix and rehabilitate Ronan point
Because disaster porn sells ratings.
I still remember how the media, especially CNN, covered the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 for weeks.
I'd expect the same for Southshore condo collapse.
I've been following it because I was following the effects of climate change on Miami real estate for awhile. Florida is my go-to spot in the USA for environmental disasters that will be bellwethers of change. This looks like a relevant event in that respect.
No reason to believe climate change had any impact on this event. Building was badly constructed and the condo owners were unwilling to fix it. It was going to collapse regardless of any weather events.
To a very great extent, yes. Shoddy construction and/or maintenance of a residential building is something we hear about only "elsewhere" so when it happens "here" it grabs a great deal of attention.
It's also scary because we have no practical way to protect ourselves against it. Before I buy a new car I read everything I can get my hands on about it. Between the car magazines and Consumer Reports I can get a pretty accurate assessment of its strong points and weak points.
Before I go through the lobby and get in the elevator to visit my friends, how am I supposed to be able to assess my safety? The answer is that we have building codes and other laws to protect us, and we have inspectors we pay to check that the codes and laws are being followed and that proper maintenance is being conducted. If I can't count on those, then I'm back in the environment of a century ago, when it was every man for himself and life was filled with "little risks."
What shall I do? How can I protect myself? I can refuse to fly on a 737 Max, but there are a lot of big buildings around. I will lead a lonely life if I can't go into any of them because I can't tell which ones are dangerous.