Risk register · entry
Q2 · The CoconutChamplain Towers collapse
The concrete corrosion was documented years earlier, never repaired, and the tower pancaked overnight.
The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.
Why this quadrant
The defect was legible enough that one engineer's report named it and priced the repair at 15 million dollars. What made it lethal was the shape of the risk rather than its difficulty. Corrosion advanced for years with nothing a resident could see, and then the building came down in seconds. Owners approved the work in April 2021. The tower fell in June.
The record
- 98 confirmed deathscertain
- 11 injuredlikely
- 136 units in the buildingcertain
- Building completed 1981certain
- Collapse at approximately 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021certain
- Morabito Consultants report dated October 8, 2018 warning of major structural damagecertain
- $15 million estimated remedial repair programcertain
- Repair program approved April 9, 2021certain
- NIST: punching shear failure at two garage column-to-pool deck slab connections began in early June 2021, about three weeks before the collapsecertain
- Some slab-column connections had less than half the code-required flexural/punching-shear strengthlikely
- $1.02 billion victims' and owners' settlement approved June 23, 2022certain
- Remaining structure demolished July 4, 2021certain
- Site sold for $120 million in May 2022 to Damaccertain
- Building subsided roughly 2mm per year during the 1990s per a separate ground-deformation studyuncertain
- NIST released final technical findings in June 2026, nearly five years after the collapsecertain
Sources
The newsletter
One risk story a week, taken apart the way this one was: what was known, what was ignored, and which quadrant it really belonged to.
No spam, one email a week.