Tag Archives: collapse

Deadly Collapse Of Illusions In Miami

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Here is video of the Miami beachside condominium that collapsed at ~1 AM on 24 June 2021 (https://youtu.be/KR29pLccutY). There are many news stories about this now.

An engineering professor at Florida International University has used satellite data on ground elevation (a measurement technique used since at least the late 1970s) to write about the steady sinking of land in Miami, including the site of the condo, since 1990. There is a lot of beachside construction in Florida on landfill. This condo was actually built on sturdier ground (I’m guessing an ancient barrier island), but landfill is right next to it on the west side, where other similar buildings are located (and thus a bit further from the shoreline).

In 2018, a building inspector engineer issued a warning that there was serious damage to the building stemming from an inadequacy of foundation integrity. Nothing was done. In another report, I read that the development-friendly local and state authorities had freed the Miami real estate industry from “excessive” regulations by only requiring building inspections every 40 years! (I find this hard to believe, but it was a news report posted on the internet).

By now it is clear that the cause of the collapse was the softening of the ground under the building by the infiltration of seawater over the years since the building’s construction. Because such a large building is very heavy, especially in comparison to a simple beachside bungalow, the weight of the structure put tremendously higher downward pressure on the ground below its foundation, diminishing the integrity of the increasingly soaked soil, and thus speeding its ultimate loss of cohesion.

Now, some words about structural stability in a gravitational field. Earth’s gravity arises from its huge mass (compared to anything else humans are used to) and it points toward the Earth’s center, which means “down.”

Buildings, bridges and many other structures erected by humans on the surface of the Earth are designed to remain stable by having rigid vertical structural members (i.e., columns) to transmit the weight of the structure into the ideally “solid” ground below, which in turn distributes the pressure of the building’s weight (as mechanical stress) into the body of Planet Earth. The contact zone between the building and the Earth is usually a cross-braced foundation structure.

Those weight-bearing vertical supports are cross-braced by horizontal rigid structural members (i.e., beams, and in stronger designs by triangular frames: trusses). This way the entire building has the structural integrity of a “block”: the Earth holds it up, and its cross-bracing holds it together.

Essential to the building’s stability is the integrity of the earth below it: its solidity. When that solidity is lost, such as by water infiltration softening, and becomes nonuniform, then the building can begin to sink in a lopsided manner. Such tilting means that now gravitation forces no longer align perfectly with “vertical” columns (since they are tilted) but also has “lateral” components of force directed along the cross-bracing (which is also tilted).

Such new lateral forces transmitted by the cross members against the sides of the columns add a sideways momentum now pushing to tilt the building over, and are also forces working to tear the building apart from top to bottom.

At some point of building tilt, such unevenness of the distribution of gravitation stress throughout the structure, now no longer strictly vertical, puts more tensile or compressive stress (depending on the orientation of the member) than one or more of the structural members can sustain without buckling; or some of the bolted, riveted or welded joints between members can sustain to keep from ripping open.

Such structural failures remove pathways for the building’s gravitational stress to find its way to ground. So the structural members of the building’s frame that are still connected see an increase in the stress they must contain and transmit to Earth to hold up the building.

This takes those still intact members and joints more quickly toward their failure points, and the weakest among them give way. In this way an accelerating cascade of structural failures occurs, and the entire building can seem to suddenly “deflate” and collapse.

Such a collapse will be seen to propagate through the building as a wave of “deflation” from the regions of first failures to last failures, which, depending on the configuration of the undermining forces, can be left-to-right or vice-versa, and bottom-to-top or vice-versa.

The World Trade Center Towers building collapses of 11 September 2001 occurred from the top down: the dynamic force of collapsing mass above any given floor (the conversion of gravitational potential energy into mass acceleration) being beyond the yield strength of the vertical columns and cross-bracing joints at each floor-level, which were only designed — with a significant safety factor — to withstand the static stress imposed by gravity. The collapse of the smaller World Trade Center Building 7 proceeded from the left to the right because of a buckling of a column weakened by fire softening.

The Miami condominium collapse of 24 June 2021 progressed from bottom to top, first on the “left” side, and then on the now laterally unsupported “right” side (as seen in the video captured by a surveillance camera).

I would guess that what is happening now in Miami — and elsewhere — is a scramble to point fingers assigning blame and to evade responsibility; people seeking to sue somebody for losses of relatives, property and illusions; to get insurance payments, or to avoid paying them; to protect their money, investments, property and advantages of location; and to run away from their fears and hide from facing up to the realities of implacable Climate Change (in the form of sea level rise for Miami) plowing steadily into the American “good life.”

Climate Change is like an enormous steamroller that is inching slowly but implacably along the open road of our projected expectations, to roll over and flatten our comfortable situations.

Since we are all “cemented in place” in those personal comfort situations, that steamroller is bit by bit squashing us: first ‘here’ then ‘there’; some by sea level rise; some by hurricanes razing all; some by wildfire; some by deepening and eternal heat and drought; some by waves of disease pathogens sprung from out of formerly deep recesses in the wild; some by the increasing withdrawal of food availability; and some by the infighting all this sparks among us and that causes casualties from our war with ourselves.

First we lose our illusions, then we lose our money, and finally we lose our lives.

Those who refuse to face reality and relinquish their illusions will cause the most damage to their fellow human beings, by being rabidly competitive, as they slide down the cascade of suffering longer and ever obsessed to the death with their unrelieved anxieties of avoiding losses and pain. Those who jettison their illusions and face reality will a least gain the comfort of finding the company of similar people.

Even as the steamroller inches forward toward us, for everyone “the future is uncertain, and the end is always near.” One can pin oneself to an obsession with “the end,” and its avoidance; or one can open oneself to an appreciation for the processes of life, and to the sharing of such appreciation.

Climate Change is now our great teacher, and its lessons range from stark terror to transcendence. We have no choice but to live out those lessons, but we do have some choice in which of those coming experiences we can aim our personal selves to.

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Photos from the news story (series) linked in two comments, below:

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The beachfront looks like an ancient barrier island to me (my guess). The “flats” behind it look like landfill (“reclaimed land”). I suspect all this land is “wet” below a shallow depth from the surface. I also suspect that depth has been decreasing with the sea level rise over previous decades, and which continues.

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27 June 2021, using Picture #1 for reference:

The surveillance camera that took the video of the collapse is located at the left-most, furthest ‘up’ seaward-side corner of the blue pool seen to the left in this photo, just below the large area of greenery. The camera was pointed diagonally across that pool, straight at the central portion of the building that collapsed. That central portion collapsed first, from the side closer to the surveillance camera and then dragging its backside (the side furthest from the surveillance camera) down. To me it seems that “the bottom dropped out” and not that the roof collapsed and pancaked down pulverizing the building. After that central section was all down, the squarish tower portion closest to the beach tottered, twisted ‘slightly’ clockwise as viewed in this picture, and then also collapsed by “the bottom dropping out.” You can see the higher pile of rubble left by that tower section collapse. I would guess that the section of ground (subsurface) between that outer tower section and the part of the building still standing, and aligned parallel to the shoreline, is the area of greatest weakness and loss of integrity. It is also possible (as others are commenting) that there had been a weakening of the reinforcing steel inside the concrete columns of the building because of the corrosive action of salty sea air and underground flooding since 1981 when the building was constructed. The conclusions of the forensic engineering reports, which will doubtless take many months to finally arrive at, will be interesting — if they are not distorted by CYA.

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Nate Hagens, on Earth and Humanity

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Watch the video presentation “Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality,” (2:52:15) by Nate Hagens, linked below. Hagens presents an analysis and grand synthesis of the multi-entwined crises of unsustainable human society living in the rapidly degrading world climate of an increasingly resource-depleted and increasingly inhospitable Planet Earth.

I guarantee that you will find many of your own views on this topic reaffirmed by Hagens, and also that he will challenge at least one of your cherished beliefs about it. This is good for serious people, it prompts them to think anew, and to rethink their assumptions.

What impresses me about Hagens’ analysis is that it is based on a wealth of data — the lifeblood of any real scientific or economic analysis — and that it is a multidimensional systems analysis, and not merely a “one note Johnny” narrow expertise (just finance, or just physics), single “smoking gun” caused problem (as the “overpopulation” reductionists claim) or a promotion of a single route to salvation solution (as the “nuclear power” reductionists claim). Hagens’s is an integrated description of the dysfunctional global system, which Nature plus Humanity has become, rather than merely being an uncoordinated list of a myriad of disconnected disasters, pathologies, ruins and wrecks.

Hagens does make specific recommendations near the end of his video, aimed at getting us (particularly in the U.S.A.) to begin dealing with our ongoing global systems failure in a substantive manner. After that he adds a few seconds of wordless video that will delight all lovers of wildlife.

Any abstraction of Hagens’ presentation to a single phrase would wash away all its insights and nuance, and would be unjust to the cause of transmitting understanding to the public. But, if you want an indicative soundbite, here is my maximally reductionist summary: humanity needs to scale back its use of energy very very significantly, and permanently, and now — an energy diet — just like a forever-maintained eat-less food-calorie diet needed to break an individual free from obesity.

Hagens’ video will make any serious person think (and we all better get serious), and that is the first essential step for us ever having a chance to get out of the mess we’re in.

Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality
16 May 2021 (Nate Hagens)
https://youtu.be/qYeZwUVx5MY

The following two paragraphs are my abstraction and consolidation of internet descriptions of Nate Hagens, with much of this information drawn from The Post Carbon Institute (https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/nate-hagens/).

Nate Hagens has a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He is a former editor of The Oil Drum and worked on Wall Street for a decade before “seeing the light.” Since 2003 Nate has shifted his focus to understanding the interrelationships between energy, environment, and finance and the implication this synthesis has for human futures. Previously, Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Currently, he teaches a systems synthesis Honors seminar at the University of Minnesota ‘Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament.’

Nate focuses on the interrelationship between debt-based financial markets and natural resources, particularly energy, and the unplanned for risks from the coming ‘Great Simplification.’ He also addresses the evolutionarily-derived underpinnings to status, addiction, and our aversion to acting about the future and offers suggestions on how individuals and society might better adapt to the coming decades.

Jeff Gibbs 2019 video “Planet of the Humans,” released publicly on Earth Day 2020, was the most important presentation on the realities of our global “climate change” crisis to be made available in many years (https://planetofthehumans.com/). Nate Hagens’ new video “Earth and Humanity: Myths and Reality” is of much grander scope and at least of equal importance. See it and don’t get defensive, then refine your own stance from your points of disagreement with Hagens, and/or improve his systemic analysis, which is the type of thing needed to converge politically on what in all honesty would have to be called a World Plan for guiding human civilization through a transition — the Great Simplification — to a post carbon future, without suffering a catastrophic and life-ending collapse.

As a 20th century mechanical engineer who focused himself on the 19th century science of thermodynamics (and got away with a career in experimental nuclear explosions), I’ve said all what little I was competent to say about the physics and economics of “climate change.” So at this point all I can offer on the topic is bad poetry, and I’ll spare you that. But I can also recognize the value of new presentations like those of Gibbs and Hagens, and urge others to see them, study them, and act on them.

I am mindful of the urgent and totally justified demand posed by the next generation onto us world-controlling and world-destroying adults, through the voice of Greta Thunberg, for “action!” Nate Hagens’ systemic analysis is a very important step toward answering the questions of “what actions?” and “how do we implement them?”, and of actually working on Greta’s demand.

[Thanks to Isabel Ebert for pointing me to Nate Hagens’ video.]

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ADDENDUM:

Richard Heinberg both appears in “Planet of the Humans,” and leads the Post Carbon Institute.

The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History
May 2021
Richard Heinberg
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-339-the-most-colossal-planning-failure-in-human-history

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Six Moody Reflections on America in Spring 2021

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ONE

“I can’t remember the exact date, but the most mind blowing moment of my life was when after an exhaustive turning over of every rock imaginable, I realized there is no energy source which will allow us to continue our daily activities at the level Westerners have become accustomed to without the world and life as we know it being destroyed in the process….And once you accept that fact, that my friends is when you have reached the intellectual point of no return in your mindset as far as the inevitability of collapse…” — Forrest Palmer

My answer to Forrest Palmer:

Collapse is only inevitable by choice, and only if civilization is defined as being the present Western-Capitalist paradigm. There are no PHYSICAL limitations to fashioning a comfortable, equitable, intelligent, culturally rich, and ecologically harmonious (which is more than merely sustainable) world civilization. All the barriers are literally mental, and literally failures of personal moral character.

I agree that looking at human history and our world today, it seems “impossible” to ever achieve the global consensus necessary to realize that new hypothetical paradigm. But, from the Universe’s perspective, it is entirely possible if we humans can summon the collective will to do so.

TWO

Most people dislike truth because it is inconvenient, discredits their cherished biases, and illuminates responsibilities they want to avoid. And that is why the 1st Amendment is the least liked and most opposed of all of them. The first thing a corporation or government agency wants you to sign away, when they buy you, is your 1st Amendment rights.

In the U.S. “commerce” and “public service” aim to kill the 1st Amendment, with the exception of by a few principled people. You have the “right” to express yourself, but if somebody else fears what you say or write, because of their insecurity and dishonesty, then they want you silenced and unemployed, or dead. Look at Julian Assange.

THREE

Is This The End Of Forests As We’ve Known Them?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/10/is-this-the-end-of-forests-as-weve-known-them

“Is this the end of forests as we’ve know them?” It depends on who the “we” is. For the “we” that is intimately connected with the natural world, it may seem like the inevitable outcome from continuing human-species existence.

But most people today, particularly in the high carbon-spewing countries, do not have any real connection to “nature”; they don’t see and don’t notice the subtlety of its cyclic changes, nor the relentlessness of its ‘permanent’ changes; they just notice immediate effects on themselves, as obstacles to their wants (or needs for the poorest).

Most Americans are urbanites or suburbanites (no undisturbed nature there), or rural exploiters of “nature”; far fewer are sensitively connected to the land and its wildlife. The social and mental inertia of the unseeing and uncaring (and worldwide) majority is why the minority nature-loving “we” — which includes materially advantaged people with the luxury to be nature lovers — is seeing Paradise wither and burn away.

Awakening that vast self-focused ‘public mind’ to an actual commitment to fundamentally alter the physical routines of its existence, and swallow the economics necessary to do so, is the fundamental challenge — and probably an impossibility — of “climate change activists” (i.e., climate anti-change activists). It is easy enough to point out this and that current instance of environmental and biodiversity loss and/or collapse, and it is easy enough to say “capitalism must die for the world to live,” but none of that has had any impact on the vast public mind, as should be evident by now, and safe to say never will.

So, what if anything will? What ideas can be injected into the public arena that gain wide public attention — which means they have to suggest immediate improvements in the economic lives of the demos — and are sufficiently motivating to create significant physical+electoral actions by the public to really begin changing public/corporate/government institutions, for the ultimate near-term purpose of de-carbonizing civilization?

I find it easy to generalize, I find it incredibly difficult to think up a detailed “plan.” Exhortation alone will never be effective, organization is the key, but organization is very, very slow and, climatically, time is very short for implementing the massive alterations that are really needed.

What are the practical (a.k.a., ideologically ‘imperfect’) steps that we (the big “we”, in the public) as individuals can take — variously in our many different constituencies, regions and countries — to spur our governments to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to climate change as the emergency it really is? Doomism is not an acceptable response.

FOUR

DAC = Direct Air Capture of CO2 is hypothetical technology — an illusion — promoted by the oil industry so they can keep drilling out oil for us all to burn or turn into plastic waste. DAC is a sham in the same way that plastic recycling is a sham for allowing the continuation of oil/plastic companies’s profiteering at Earth’s expense. Only about 9% of all plastic waste is recycled, the rest is a growing mass of pollution poisoning our rivers, oceans, lands, foods and bodies. The only plastics with any possibility of being reprocessed for reuse are those labeled 1 and 2, and maybe also 5.

The fallacy of DAC is like trying to design a better helmet that allows you continue playing Russian Roulette. The obvious — surest, quickest, cheapest — solution to the problem is to just stop. And so it is with the production of CO2 and plastics. My physics analysis of DAC is given in these two articles.

The Improbability of CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere
9 August 2020
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-co2-removal-from-the-atmosphere/

Stream Tube CO2 Removal Machine
8 August 2020
https://manuelgarciajr.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/stream-tube-co2-removal-machine.pdf

FIVE

On 27 October 1962, Vasili Arkhipov single handedly prevented the launching a nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., by doggedly refusing to allow for the launching of a nuclear warhead torpedo against an American warship relentlessly depth charging his Russian submarine for five hours, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It took three senior officers on the submarine each with an individual key all needed in unison to enable the launch mechanism. Everyone else on that submarine favored the torpedo counterattack because they feared they were on the brink of being sunk. Vasili Arkhipov alone dissented, and that prevented the launching of nuclear weapons, and inevitably an intercontinental nuclear war.

The Man Who Saved The World, Vasili Arkhipov
https://youtu.be/iQYC6OlwC5k

The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis – Matthew A. Jordan
https://youtu.be/bwWW3sbk4EU

Vasili Arkhipov, 2017 Future of Life Award winner for averting nuclear war
https://youtu.be/iLokpu4ixQE

Preventing nuclear war, ending all war, really facing global heating worldwide and equitably right away and persistently ever after, which all mean ending poverty and hunger and disease and suffering and ecocide worldwide are the challenges and obligations we face today. We all need to become Arkhipovs confronting those challenges.

I think I’ll remember every 27 October as “Arkhipov Day,” or Human Solidarity Day.

SIX

Stan Goff wrote: “In my early childhood, we had duck-and-cover drills. As I reach the sunset of this life, we have active-shooter drills. God bless America.”

That prompted these thoughts of mine:

For me the worst such moment was 22 October 1962, watching JFK on TV during the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My parents were glued to the B&W TV in our New York apartment, and I was glued to them watching that TV (I was 12). We didn’t know if Khrushchev would incinerate us in NYC with Russian nuclear-tipped ICMBs before or after JFK incinerated my grandparents in Havana with US nuclear-tipped ICBMs. We didn’t care about Moscow at that point. Fortunately, both Arkhipov and Khrushchev felt a greater connection to humanity than did Kennedy, because of their (all 3) searing memories of WWII losses, and defused the standoff at the Nuclear OK Corral.

So, I was free thereafter to pursue my boyish dreams in the sunny 60s and 70s, only limited by my degree of perseverance (high), relatively modest talents, political naïveté, the Vietnam War draft (dodged a bullet there), the Glass Ceiling protecting White Supremacy (the Prime Directive, as I found out), and the randomness of luck and lucklessness (can’t complain too much here).

When I saw families with naked children begging in the streets of Havana, in June 1959, I became viscerally aware that there were many people undeservingly much worse off that I was, and I have never lost that feeling. And over time my rage against authority (and against people in general when I’m at my glummest) has only grown because they continue to allow that to continue, and even worsen in many places — which I know is entirely unnecessary — and all because of selfishness: bigotry and greed.

As I look toward the sunset of my life, I just hope to love my family and delight them, amuse my few friends on occasion, enjoy health and art as long as I’m able, and forgive myself for my own degree of selfishness (which I know I am not going to relinquish) and for my amateurish ineffectiveness (and, frankly, laziness) at prompting any significant social improvements. In brief: my human imperfection.

My legacy is imprinted on the wind, and as the fleeting memories held by a few I hold dear. My message to the world: have fun, and be kind.

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