STEELY DAMN

Now nobody would expect a profit-mongering construction company working for sleazy developers in Florida to actually cut corners or do shoddy work, but…oh my, click here for story that illustrates support columns had exactly one-half as much steel rebar as the plans called for.

The victim recovery myth has been dispelled and we await demolition of remaining tower then rubble work to recover what bodies can be accessed. The death toll will rise for many more weeks as the painful, painstaking work goes on. It is becming obvious that the residents were not told they were in danger living in the disintegrating building…did they even know whether it was salt water intruding and flooding the parking basement?

OUR FUTURE LOOKS LIKE FLORIDA, STILL

UPDATED UPDATE: Just cancelled my plans to move into a cheap Florida condo, oh shucks. Today word comes that near Orlando un-permitted repair work has been halted on condos there. County says you live therein at your own risk the wa;kways may collapse. Anybody wanna hazard a guess about how the remodelling was done at Mara Lago?
Back at Surfside there are plans to quickly demolish what remains standing at the informal burial groiund that was once a condo…bet those evacuated folks will not be allowed to retrieve stuff left behind. Imagine the final dollar value of the lawsuits and settlements and then woonder over ow insurance companies will sue the condo owners to prevent havong to pay insurance claims after an Act of Man that was preventable. Reckless driving parallels rickless owning?

UPDATE: Another Miami suburb has ordered the evacuation of a ten-story condo building. This condo building is 48 years old, but had managed to keep delaying any inspection reports to the suburb government. That’s despite a law that would have required a report eight years ago, if such a law mattered or was going to be enforced. So neither the residents nor the local bureaucrats seemed to care that everybody knew the building was falling apart. Finally, the city bluffed the condo association with an evacuation threat, the condo-ers relinquished their report and then the town had no choice but to order an evacuation. All this enforcement stuff is so time-consuming and bothersome. Leaves less time for beach-combing or sailing...

Last week I wrote about how Florida exemplifies the wrongness of our American status quo. Even more information is now being made public about how rotten and dangerous where those former condos, now funereal rubble, in Surfside.
This story says the situation had so deteriorated by last fall that repair workers pulled out…one reason: you can’t shut the pool!

The vipers are alive and we have collectively clutched them to our breasts. Here’s is some of what I wrote: “These United States are devolving into an increasingly dangerous, disfunctional, delusional nation. We have embraced several poison vipers simultaneously. We have a politics viper that protects greed and a ‘free market.’ Free market really means ‘if you have the money, go for it.’ We generally avoid government regulation which is often portrayed by the free marketeers as simply ruinous interference with good business. And we all know that government bureaucracies tend to rely on experts and right-wing politics make it clear that experts are just here to impinge on our freedoms–from public health doctors to gun violence statisticians to climate change researchers. So in red states we hug the de-regulation viper and the lower taxes viper, hoping to starve government into total indifference. Even minimum wage jobs are always portrayed as endangered by what some politician in Washington or a state capitol wants to do… Then we add in the vaporous viper of misinformation and Putinesque burlesque via social media and you get US 2021. Misinformed, uninformed, trapped in a system rigged for the 1% and geared to ignore real dangers from pandemic to climate change to disintegrating condos.”

So one wonders–how many of the inactive condo board members survived the killer collapse that they dithered into being?
The board no longer functions, A Florida judge today ordered the condo association into receivership and the new boss is an outside administrator but it has been disclosed the association has assets of less than a million dollars and that won’t even cover the costs of the coming,necessary demolition.

How will White House wannabe Gov. DeSantos try to blame this on Obama or taxes or immigrants?

The experts–constructuon workers and engineers–knew how bad the condo tower was. They pulled out! Isn’t that when a real honest organization would have evacuated its members? But think of the condo price deflation…

The condo owners clearly did not grasp their own personal danger and apparently the local city had zero concern. In a nation where expertise is derided and not respected, it’s not surprusing that everybody would try to deny the undeniable. It is classic de-regulation, laissez-faire, money-first American life. It has allowed Exxon and other fossil fuel firms to lie about climate change for decades. Clearly a forty-year delay between building and re-certififcation is totally bogus for Florida, where salt water intrusion, limestone and sink holes, hurricanes annually and well-knwon shoddy construction practices are widespread. Even just thirty year cycles might have saved over 100 lives.

Florida could be Brazil or Beijing or Belaruss. Florida is definitely us and U.S.