MY OWN LITTLE CHAMPLAIN TOWER or A Hard Story About a Soft Story

 

July 20, 2021 My Own Little Champlain Tower or A Hard Story About a Soft Story PREVIOUS BLOGS: TERRYBAUM.BLOGSPOT.COM PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED. PODCASTS, EVENTS, INFO, POSTERS: LilithTheater.com

How could they have possibly waited so long to make repairs?!? Of course that's the first thing I thought when I heard about the terrible tragedy of the disintegration of Champlain Towers South in Seaside, Florida. And I continued to think it again and again as I read about the engineer's report and the procrastination of the condo board. Basically, I thought "I would never do anything like that. Those people on the board were dithering idiots who refused to see what was truly important --- the structural integrity of the building they lived in." I would never... I would never... I would never... I would never... But I did. HOW IT HAPPENED: My home on Douglass Street was built in 1908. It consists of two flats. I live in the bottom flat, a storefront that was originally an Italian bakery. In 2004, we were having some work done on the basement, and a structural engineer came to check it out. He walked in the front door, stopped and looked around. He said to me, "You know, you have what is known as a soft story." He went on: "There's almost nothing holding up the second story except inertia. It could easily pancake on you if we had a really strong earthquake."

I did not need to be a structural engineer to understand what he was talking about. It was plain to see. The front facade, an old-fashioned storefront, was plate glass windows from one end of the building to the other. The only structural elements holding up the second floor were four sticks of wood around the entrance. In this photo I have drawn (very messy) arrows pointing to two of the sticks. They were -- what? -- 2 inches square? Maybe. Did a cold chill of terror shake me when I understood that at any moment my upstairs neighbor's flat could come plunging down on top of me? Did I ask the structural engineer

when he could start working on reinforcing/replacing the facade? No. But the next time I talked to my father, who was the actual owner of the building, I told him what the engineer had said. My father was very much a man of the world, very rooted in being a grown-up and taking care of business. He responded, "Well, you have a deadline now, don't you? The facade needs to be replaced before the next earthquake." Did my father, being a man of the world, say, "Since we have absolutely no idea when the next earthquake will occur, please call that engineer first thing tomorrow morning and get started on this project"? No. We dropped the subject. Perhaps one reason we both felt no urgency about replacing the facade was because the building had come through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake unscathed. In 2005, my father died. I was much less likely to take on a major project without him. Then, April 18, 2006, arrived -- the 100th anniversary of the infamous 1906 earthquake. In honor of the occasion, the San Francisco Chronicle published in the Sunday edition an entire magazine describing what would happen NOW if an earthquake as strong as the one in '06 struck the city. The devastation would be unimaginable. You see, the 1906 earthquake was SIXTEEN TIMES STRONGER than the 1989 earthquake. Sixteen times! For example, anyone standing at that moment in '06 was thrown to the ground. I was standing in 1989 and I was NOT thrown to the ground. I didn't know an earthquake was happening, so I thought I was having a stroke. But I did not fall. It just so happens there is a seismograph in Gottingen, Germany that was operating in 1906 and was STILL operating in 1989. So we can see an actual visual comparison of the two quakes.

Sometimes one seismograph is worth a thousand words. 'Nuf said. So, in April 2006, I truly understood the urgency of the facade project. Clearly, if my building had been around in 1906, the second floor would have pancaked on me. And did that motivate me to immediately call that structural engineer? No. But eeeeeventuuuuuuuualllllllllly my architect friend agreed to design the project. But he was very busy and had many bigger and more interesting projects that took precedence. We finally broke ground in late 2011 -- FIVE AND A HALF YEARS AFTER I'D DEEPLY REALIZED HOW URGENT IT WAS. The contractor put up a great deal of scaffolding to hold up the second story as they removed and rebuilt the first story facade. The carpenter started to remove one of the large plate glass windows by sawing it away from the wood at the top.... .... and he couldn't get his saw out because the second story had SETTLED on the saw. In other words..... THE SECOND STORY WAS BEING HELP UP BY TWO 103-YEAR-OLD PLATE GLASS WINDOWS! That was very exciting for everyone. In fact, over a long period of time, glass turns into water. The windows were already quite wavy. The contractor and carpenter IMMEDIATELY devised a LOT more scaffolding to support the second story. The job was finished without any further excitement, and today I have a very lovely facade with plate glass windows that aren't quite as wide, to allow for vertical steel and concrete panels at either end. There is also a hidden steel beam that goes across the whole width of the top of the facade and attaches to the vertical panels.

And it was finished before the next earthquake. What am I trying to say here? That it is human nature to procrastinate about big, complex problems. Perhaps the most important thing in my father's life was the physical well-being of his children. He had plenty of money. But although he was basically rational, he had an unconscious BELIEF that an earthquake would never threaten my life. And what about ME? I would say the most important thing in MY life is my own continued existence. And yet I procrastinated from 2004 until 2011 on fixing a threat to that existence. The condo board in Florida has nothing on me. And now, we are facing the crisis of Global Warming. The very urgency and enormity of it --- the reasons that we need to face it fully right now -- are the very reasons that we continue to procrastinate and take half-measures when double-measures are called for. Now we must rise above our human nature, in order to save civilization itself. Dear Bloggelinis: I believe It's a matter of getting our governments to act. I want to hear from you about YOUR ideas of what we can (and must) do. Send me links to actions so that I can make a list to send back to you. Terry