1981 – March 27, Construction Failure, Harbor Cay Condominium, Cocoa Beach FL– 11

lornajarrettblanchard March 27, 1918

1981 — March 27, Construction Failure, Harbour Cay Condominium, Cocoa Beach, FL–11

–11 AP. “OSHA, condo officials meet as search…ended.” Syracuse Herald-Journal, 3-30-1981, p. A5.

–11 Carper and Feld. Construction Failure. 1997, p. 9.

–11 Delatte. Beyond Failure: Forensic Case Studies for Civil Engineers. 2009, p. 149.

–11 Snyder. “Cocoa Beach Disaster Changed Industry in Florida.” Orlando Sentinel, 4-26-1987

–11 Thomas. “When The Walls Came Down.” Orlando Sentinel, FL, 4-20-1997.

–11 US GAO. Transportation: Further Examination of the East Chicago, Indiana… 1982, p. 9.

–11 Wright. Disasters and Heroic Rescues of Florida. 2006, p. 119.

Narrative Information

Carper and Feld: “Harbor Cay Condominium, Cocoa Beach, Florida, March 1981. A five-story cast-in-place reinforced concrete building collapsed due to design and construction deficiencies, killing 11 construction workers and injuring 23 others.” (Carper and Feld. Construction Failure. 1997, 9.)

Delatte: “The collapse of the flat-plate Harbour Cay Condominium building in Cocoa Beach, Florida, on March 27, 1981, was caused by a punching shear failure that triggered a progressive collapse, much like those at 2000 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston and Skyline Plaza in Virginia. Eleven workers were killed and 23 were injured….” (Delatte. Beyond Failure: Forensic Case Studies for Civil Engineers. 2009, p. 149.)

National Bureau of Standards abstract: “The investigation of the collapse of a five-story reinforced concrete flat-plate structure under construction at Cocoa Beach, Florida is presented in this report. The investigation included onsite inspection, laboratory tests and analytical studies.

“Based on the results of this investigation, it is concluded that the most probable cause of the failure was insufficient punching shear capacity in the fifth-floor slab to resist the applied construction loads.

“Two factors contributed to the low punching shear capacity, one in the design stage and the other in the construction stage, in the design, the omission of a check for punching shear resulted in a smaller slab thickness than needed to satisfy the Code requirements. In construction, the use of specified chairs having insufficient height to support the top reinforcing steel resulted in more than the cover specified in the structural drawings. Both factors contributed to reducing the effective depth of the slab such that it had insufficient strength to resist the construction loads.

“The analysis showed that shear stresses in the slab at many column locations on the fifth floor exceeded the nominal shear strength. Thus, punching shear failure at one of the columns precipitated a progressive failure of the slab throughout the entire fifth floor. Collapse of the fifth floor, in turn, caused the successive collapse of the lower floor slabs. The analysis of the structure indicated that the failure of the fifth floor slab most likely initiated at column G-2, an interior column which supported the last bay of freshly placed concrete prior to the collapse.” (National Bureau of Standards. Investigation of Construction Failure of Harbour Cay Condominium in Cocoa Beach, Florida. August 1982, p. iii.)

Snyder: “The collapse of the Harbour Cay Condominium building at Cocoa Beach in 1981 prompted two major building-industry changes, but nothing can make it absolutely certain that a similar catastrophe could not happen again, according to the engineer who investigated the disaster for the state. Oscar E. Olsen, who investigated the collapse in which 11 construction workers died and 23 were injured, said the changes made since then in testing the qualifications of engineers and more stringent construction inspection requirements are good but not foolproof.

“Olsen, president of O.E. Olsen & Associates of St. Petersburg, concluded that the Harbour Cay collapse was ‘’100 percent design error’ and had nothing to do with construction techniques or deficiencies….

“After the Harbour Cay collapse, the Florida Legislature passed a law in 1983 that requires additional inspections of buildings of more than three stories and those that are designed to seat more than 500 people.

“And, since 1985, people going into the structural-engineering business must pass a special structural-engineering examination, said Allen R. Smith, executive director of the Board of Professional Engineers. The board, a part of the Florida Department of Professional Regulation, regulates the engineering profession. That test was inaugurated because of concerns raised after the Harbour Cay collapse, Smith said. To become a licensed professional engineer in Florida, a person must have an accredited engineering degree, have four years’ experience under a registered and practicing engineer, and have successfully completed a 16-hour examination stressing his particular area of experience, Smith said.

“Olsen said better engineering education would help prevent building disasters. More stringent standards may be difficult to implement, however, ‘’because engineers take great exception to questioning their competency,’’ he said….

“Olsen said that many lenders financing commercial building construction now require review of design plans by another firm besides the designer….

“William Hewes, Orange County Building Department director, said Orange County, like most governments in Florida, requires engineers and architects to sign their designs and plans before a building permit is issued. That clearly identifies responsibility for having the structure designed to meet building codes, he said.” (Snyder, Jack. “Cocoa Beach Disaster Changed Industry in Florida.” Orlando Sentinel, 4-26-1987.)

Thomas: “….Workers were finishing the roof when there was a crack. The fifth floor fell on the fourth floor, and together they fell on the third floor, and so on until all the floors were stacked up on the ground like concrete pancakes….

“The final death toll was 11. Average age: 28.

“I was the lead reporter for the Florida Today newspaper on the ensuing investigation of what happened at Harbour Cay. My partner was J. Wyatt Emmerich, a cub reporter from Mississippi….

“It was Wyatts passion that gained him the confidence of the workers who survived the collapse. Those workers told him about stress cracks that spread around support columns in the building and about floors that sagged badly. They talked about a company called Towne Realty, a name not on any public documents having to do with Harbour Cay.

“Everyone thought a Cocoa Beach outfit called Univel was the developer and builder. But the workers said the construction supervisors reported to a guy named Jack Bennett from Towne Realty. The company turned out to be a big Milwaukee developer behind many condominiums in Cocoa Beach. Univel turned out to be a small-potatoes family construction company that went poof and vanished after the disaster.

“Towne spokesman Mike Mervis said over and over that Univel was in charge of construction, and that Towne had the contract to prove it. I learned to write on eggshells, Mike threatening lawsuits…

“It turned out that Harbour Cay fell because it was so poorly designed that it could not hold up its own weight.

“Everyone from Towne to the architect was cited for wrongdoing by state or federal agencies. They reached a joint settlement with injured workers and families of the dead for $10 million. There was no mention of a memorial. It wasn’t like these 11 men were astronauts.

“Nobody admitted responsibility or showed any remorse….

“Sixteen years later, I am looking at an article in Florida Today about a nine-story condominium project near downtown Cocoa called Oleander Pointe. The developer is Towne Realty. The general contractor is Jack Bennett…there…is a statement from…Mike Mervis. He says he wants to set the record straight: Towne Realty was not the developer of Harbour Cay… I call Mike. He is not glad to hear from me. He launches into a familiar tirade and threatens lawsuits. After a second call, Mike…says what he meant was that Towne was not in charge of construction. We may be splitting hairs here, Mervis says. If its important to you, you can say I made a mistake… I’m sick of Harbour Cay, he says.

“Think how sick he would be if he had lost a child….” (Thomas. “When The Walls Came Down.” Orlando Sentinel, FL, 4-20-1997.)

Wright: “….Ken Carper, professor of architecture at Washington State University and a specialist in forensic construction, has written that the four common underlying causes of construction accidents are ignorance, carelessness, negligence, and greed. It would seem all four were represented at Harbour Cay.

“Two weeks before the collapse, workers reported serious stress cracks, shaped like spider webs, encircling support columns all through the building. Supervisors marked the cracks with yellow crayon then ignored them, the workers said. The men also said the concrete floors were noticeably sagging between the support columns and added that the wooden beams supporting the concrete floors during construction were cracked and bowed. The steel and concrete pilings that are driven into the ground to make up the building’s foundation had already failed a test in one area, but the work continued. Workers wanted to remain anonymous to avoid trouble with future employment, but said they were ignored by their supervisors and told the motto in construction is, ‘Go like hell.’

“Keeping building costs down makes for higher profits and speeding construction is part of that equation ‘People who develop condominiums do it to make money, and they use the most inexpensive workers and materials,’ said Jeffe Hoxie, a Cocoa architect who was a past member of the Florida Board of Architects. He also stated, ‘The basic underlying reason why eleven people are dead is pure and simple greed.”

“As various investigations proceeded, it became increasingly clear that Professor Carper was correct when, speaking of building failures, he said, ‘Failures seldom result from a single error made by an individual.’

“Beginning in the late 1970s, Cocoa Beach building inspectors were having a hard time keeping up with the increased pace on construction in their town. When they received the architectural drawings from the Harbour Cay architect, William Juhn, along with the structural drawings of his structural engineer, Harold Meeler, the Cocoa Beach inspectors accepted them, although the drawings differed in critical ways.

“Cocoa Beach officials had also started permitted the structural engineers for various undertakings to conduct inspections on their own projects. At the same time they stopped sending design plans to the Southern Building Code Congress for review. Instead, a city engineer, whose specialty was the city sewage treatment plant, was assigned to check the plans, in order to save the city money.

“The design for Harbour Cay was determined by two men who were former engineers at NASA, Harold Meeler and Agustus Allen. Allen did the structural calculations from the first floor up and Meeler did the foundation calculations. According to state consulting engineers, Allen’s design contained structurally fatal mistakes. The floor was too thin, there weren’t enough supporting columns, and the columns were inadequate. There was no solid inner concrete wall to strengthen the structure against high winds, and the structure was not strong enough to support its own weight, let alone the weight added during construction.

“Investigations further determined that three unlicensed subcontractors who had never passed any sort of proficiency verification were responsible for the support structure of the luxury building. Then too, the concrete industry, largely unregulated by government, was known to frequently evade the few standards that were in existence. Additionally, county concrete testing and production firms were not knowledgeable about building codes that required tests of concrete poured on construction projects like Harbour Cay. Further, the testing company doing the tests at Harbour Cay was not accredited by the U.S. government’s program….

“The state consultant investigating the accident came down hard on the designers of the structure, while the investigator for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration agreed that the design was deficient but believed errors in construction — incorrectly placed steel support bars, for example — were major contributors to the collapse.

“Although the architect, two engineers,[1] and two contractors were disciplined as the result of the tragedy, little else changed. The developer was permitted to complete another similar project not far from the scene of the disaster.

“Cocoa Beach’s senator, John Vogt, a civil engineer, pushed hard to toughen state construction laws, but in the end he was unable to convince enough other lawmakers and no laws were changed. A Cocoa Beach architect put it succinctly: ‘You don’t legislate greed.’

“The survivors of Florida’s worst construction accident eventually settled out of court for $10 million, ending the largest statewide legal action in Florida’s history, two records no one could ever want to set.” (Wright. Disasters and Heroic Rescues of Florida. 2006, pp. 118-121.)

Newspapers at the Time

March 28: “Cocoa Beach (AP) — A five-story waterfront condominium collapsed ‘like a house of cards’ Friday [March 27], killing nine workers and leaving five missing — and one trapped alive under a heavy pile of debris, authorities said. Dozens were injured. ‘The earth shook and there was a big gust of dust,’ said Gary Whittaker, a reporter in WFTV-Orlando’s office across the street from the Harbor Cay construction side in this Atlantic Coast resort town just south of Cape Canaveral. ‘It’s all flat, except for about three stories of one elevator shaft.’….

“Witnesses said 50 to 60 workers were on the project — about a dozen of them on the roof — when the accident occurred about 3 p.m….

“‘I was watching it pour when the floor just gave out from under me,’ said Mike Hocko, a foreman on the concrete-pouring crew working at the top of the five-story building… ‘I rode one of the (concrete) forms down all the way. Then I picked myself up and started helping the others.’…” (Associated Press. “Condominium collapse kills nine.” News-Herald, Panama City, FL, 3-28-1981, p. 2A.)

March 29: “Cocoa Beach (AP) — Rescuers used giant cranes to lift slabs of concrete while hundreds of volunteers poked through tons of rubble Saturday in a grim search for six more construction workers feared dead in a collapsed riverfront condominium where 10 other bodies had been found….Construction on the plush five-story, 45-unit Harbor City condominium, owned by Univel Inc., was begun in December by Dynamic Construction of Merritt Island….

“The fire chief identified the dead as

Larry Wilson, Cocoa, Fla.;

Larry Hayes, an inmate on work-release from Cocoa Correctional Institution;

Leroy Hudson, Rockledge, Fla.;

Michael Creese, Cocoa Beach;[2]

Lot C. Mitchum, Merritt Island;

John J. Mang, Cocoa;

David Dickerson, Cocoa;

Randolph W. Dunn, Cape Canaveral, Fla.; and

Earl Stanley McNeil, Cocoa….

The 10^th victim pulled from the rubble had not yet been identified….”

(Associated Press/Ike Flores. “‘No hope’ for missing in condo catastrophe.” News-Herald, Panama City, FL, 3-29-1981, p. D1.)

March 30: “Cocoa Beach, Fla. (AP) — The search for bodies amid the broken concrete and twisted metal of a collapsed five-story condominium has been halted by officials who say the 11^th body pulled from the rubble probably is the last….The body of 22-year-old Darrell Nowakowski was found yesterday afternoon, 48 hours after the accident that one inspector termed the worst construction disaster in Florida history….” (Associated Press. “OSHA, condo officials meet as search for bodies ended.” Syracuse Herald-Journal, 3-30-1981, p. A5.)

March 31: “Cocoa Beach (AP) — Federal investigators Monday [March 30] asked developers of the unfinished condominium building that collapsed and killed 11 workers to hand over details on concrete preparations and other construction information regarding the tragedy, which also injured 23 others….

“Investigators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration met with officials of the Univel Inc., the prime contractor and developer of th $10 million five-story project, according to Univel spokesman Mike Mervis. The collapsed structure was to be one of five buildings in the project…Mervis said the agency sought 10 items, most of them dealing with how the concrete was mixed and how it was supported once it was poured….He said OSHA also asked for a list of all contractors, subcontractors, victims, survivors and others who were working at the riverfront property when the structure suddenly collapsed. Mervis said the material will be handed over ‘today or tomorrow if we can get them together that soon.’

“…the site [is] situated between State Road A1A and the Banana River in East Central Florida….unit prices were to have been started at $90,000…Eighty percent of the 45-unit building had been sold.” (Associated Press. “Condominium developers asked to hand over construction plans.” News-Herald, Panama City, FL, 3-31-1981, p. 5A.)

April 1: “Cocoa Beach, Fla. (AP)….Some of the men working on the building at the time of the disaster claimed the forms, which are used to support the concrete floor levels as the building goes up, were pulled after two days, not allowing the concrete to set properly. Univel spokesman Mervis said he isn’t sure when the forms were pulled, but maintained that just because the company requested the text data two or three days after each floor was poured doesn’t necessarily mean the forms were pulled that quickly. ‘If something was wrong with this building, then something is wrong with the industry standards,’ Mervis said. ‘If there was an anomaly of some kind then it was a long shot — a one in a million thing.

“Univel, one of the largest developers on the Brevard County coast, has built eight other condominium projects, totaling more than 1,000 units. It has begun site-clearing work for its largest project, a 15-story, 108-unit condo complex called Xanadu….” (Associated Press. “Experts stymied by condo collapse.” Playground Daily News, Fort Walton Beach, FL, 4-1-1981, 8D.)

Sep 13: “The engineer who had primary responsibility for the Cocoa Beach, Fla., condominium that collapsed last spring, killing 11 construction workers, surrendered his license today and said he would never practice again. Harold A. Meeler, the engineer, in giving up his license, told a state board that he would pay $3,000, the maximum fine, to avoid a hearing on the collapse of the five-story Harbour Cay condominium. The collapse, on March 27, also injured 23 workers.

“Mr. Meeler, who is 59 years old, agreed to refrain from seeking another license unless all civil litigation related to the collapse is resolved in his favor.

“Another engineer involved in the project, Augustus M. Allen, also gave up his license after the Florida Department of Professional Regulation took action against him. Charges are also pending against an architect and two contractors.” (Associated Press. “Engineer in Building Collapse Gives Up His Florida License.” New York Times, 9-13-1981.)

Sources

Associated Press. “Condominium collapse kills nine.” News-Herald, Panama City, FL, 3-28-1981, p. 2A. Accessed 5-20-2017 at: https://newspaperarchive.com/panama-city-news-herald-mar-28-1981-p-2/?tag

Associated Press. “Condominium developers asked to hand over construction plans.” News-Herald, Panama City, FL, 3-31-1981, p. 5A. Accessed 9-1-2018 at: https://newspaperarchive.com/panama-city-news-herald-mar-31-1981-p-5/

Associated Press. “Engineer in Building Collapse Gives Up His Florida License.” New York Times, 9-13-1981. Accessed 9-1-2018 at: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/13/us/engineer-in-building-collapse-gives-up-his-florida-license.html?sq=Harbor+Cay+Condominium&scp=3&st=cse

Associated Press. “Experts stymied by condo collapse.” Playground Daily News, Fort Walton Beach, FL, 4-1-1981, 8D. Accessed 9-1-2018 at: https://newspaperarchive.com/fort-walton-beach-playground-daily-news-apr-01-1981-p-30/

Associated Press/Ike Flores. “‘No hope’ for missing in condo catastrophe.” News-Herald, Panama City, FL, 3-29-1981, p. D1. Accessed 5-20-2017 at: https://newspaperarchive.com/panama-city-news-herald-mar-29-1981-p-25/?tag

Associated Press. OSHA, condo officials meet as search for bodies ended.” Syracuse Herald-Journal, 3-30-1981, p. A5. Accessed 5-20-2017 at: https://newspaperarchive.com/syracuse-herald-journal-mar-30-1981-p-5/?tag

Carper, Kenneth L. and Jacob Feld. Construction Failure. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997. Partially digitized by Google at: http://books.google.com/books?id=-jnlb-oJxcEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=true

Delatte, Norbert J. Jr. Beyond Failure: Forensic Case Studies for Civil Engineers. Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers Press, 2009.

National Bureau of Standards, U.S. Dept. of Commerce. Investigation of Construction Failure of Harbour Cay Condominium in Cocoa Beach, Florida (NSA Building Science Series 145). Washington, DC: NBS, August 1982, 154 pages. Accessed 9-1-2018 at: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GOVPUB-C13-ceefee8ac748574856d8ae9ea1cf2d70/pdf/GOVPUB-C13-ceefee8ac748574856d8ae9ea1cf2d70.pdf

Snyder, Jack. “Cocoa Beach Disaster Changed Industry in Florida.” Orlando Sentinel, 4-26-1987. Accessed 9-1-2018 at: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1987-04-26/news/0120370211_1_harbour-cay-olsen-engineering

Thomas, Mike. “When The Walls Came Down.” Orlando Sentinel, FL, 4-20-1997. Accessed 8-31-2018 at: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1997-04-20/news/9704170614_1_harbour-cay-cocoa-beach-towne-realty

United States Government Accountability Office. Transportation: Further Examination of the East Chicago, Indiana, Highway Ramp Collapse Could Help Prevent Similar Accidents (CED-82-120). Washington: GAO 9-2-1982. Accessed at: http://gao.gov/assets/140/138719.pdf

Wright, Lynne E. “Harbour Cay Condominiums Collapse.” Chapter 14 in Disasters and Heroic Rescues of Florida. Guilford, CT: Insiders’ Guide, an imprint of the Globe Pequot Press, 2006.

[1] See Associated Press reporting in New York Times of 9-13-1981 below.

[2] Wright has the name as Michael Cresse, aged 24.