On at least one occasion, equipment scraped along the privacy wall, putting gouges in the non-structural concrete block wall around the pool area, engineers Jonathan Bain and Frank Morabito noted in a 2020 report conducted on behalf of the Champlain South condo association. For years, equipment used for demolition and construction drove back and forth along the wall. The street was torn out and replaced with a much narrower walkway to the beach as part of the Eighty Seven Park project. Lehman’s model showed the sagging was particularly severe in the middle of the deck and along the southern wall, where water used to pool causing problems for the structure, according to construction permits and records from the condo board. The pool deck at Champlain South was too thin, cracking and bowing over the large spans between the columns holding it up, computer modeling showed. So Lehman and her team shifted their focus farther south, to an area of the pool deck burdened with heavy planters that were not supported by beams, where the collapse revealed significant problems along the southern perimeter wall, a below-ground-level structural element made of reinforced concrete. And the first sounds of collapse were heard as Vásquez and Accardi drove into the garage, through the exact area where the assumed concrete failure would have occurred. Sarmiento’s video, which prompted the speculation about an initial concrete failure at the north side of the deck, was taken after the deck collapsed, so the visible debris could easily have been a result of the cave-in rather than a cause. A months-long reconstruction of the timeline eventually undermined all scenarios that put initial concrete failures on the northern edge of the deck.
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