[00:00:00] Eric Goranson: It's around the house. When it comes remodeling and renovating your home, there is a lot to know the we that you can. This is around the house. Welcome to Around the House Show. This is where we help you get the most outta your home through information. And education. Thanks for joining us today on our midweek special.

[00:00:34] Eric Goranson: I wanted to talk today about why buildings collapse. And you know, a few years ago we had the Surfside condominium collapse, uh, on June 24th, 2021, down in, uh, Surfside, Florida. And now we've got the building in Davenport, Iowa, and you start to see some similarities between the buildings and what's going on.

[00:00:59] Eric Goranson: Now [00:01:00] we've seen a lot over the years of, you know, older brick buildings that have had water damage that have started to fail. Now I think we need to start looking at these older buildings and the cities involved in the building departments involved in coming up with some kind of an inspection process to make sure that these things are safe.

[00:01:25] Eric Goranson: Because when we built brick buildings that were. 4, 5, 6, and larger stories tall. Back in the day, they were built at a, you know, brick, their unreinforced masonry buildings. They were not built to today's building codes. And the problem is, is that a hundred year old brick building. Where it's depending on the brick, it's not a facade, but the brick is part of the structure.

[00:01:51] Eric Goranson: You know, a hundred years of sun, rain, snow or whatever can take its toll on that building and maybe that mortar hasn't been maintained. You've [00:02:00] got water damage behind it and unfortunately, you're just asking for a building collapse. And I think this is where as cities and municipalities. We need to start taking some ownership and making sure that these buildings are safe, especially when we have people inside that are renting.

[00:02:19] Eric Goranson: You know, we have apartment complexes, condominiums, things like that. And this is where the discussion gets pretty tough because sometimes these buildings are gonna get condemned or they're gonna need hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of work to make sure they're safe. And yes, that falls on a landowner.

[00:02:41] Eric Goranson: Or a building owner. And that's where these start to have, you know, tough discussions. But to be honest, you know, that's one of those things that that gets tough. And this is where these laws get to be really difficult because I understand where the city's coming from. But at the other point, I have a friend who [00:03:00] is battling the same issue where he has got a building old, a hundred year old single story building in Portland, Oregon.

[00:03:08] Eric Goranson: He has a, uh, contracting company in there and somebody keeps cutting holes in the roof to break in because he's got a security system. And when he went to go repair the roof of somebody breaking into his building to steal tools out of it, the city said, uh, he needed a building permit and then he was gonna have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to earthquake retrofitted just to repair a building that was broken into.

[00:03:36] Eric Goranson: You're just trying to follow a building code. So I think we need to figure out some ways to do this and I think that, uh, I think we're gonna have to help some of these building owners get these things up to speed because I guarantee you, in every city out there, major metropolitan area, we have buildings that are similar to this one in Iowa that are probably in a similar condition.

[00:03:58] Eric Goranson: You know, if you look at the [00:04:00] news reports that you see, they talk about. The residents are talking about, you know, rotten holes in floors from water and sewer damage. While all of that rot with all of that old wood, you're asking for problems. And many times all it takes is for one floor to fail and it drops on the next floor that fails, and all of a sudden you've got a partial building collapse.

[00:04:30] Eric Goranson: So these are things I think that we're gonna have to start having some hard. Discussions about to prevent this in the future because something like this, they were working on the building at the time. This city knew that there was a big problem with this building, that there were issues there, and clearly something went wrong in the repairs on the construction of this because one, you had people in the building, two things obviously were not [00:05:00] shored up or it had nothing to do with the contractor.

[00:05:03] Eric Goranson: Or the people were showing up to get ready to do work and they haven't even. Hadn't even started yet. Who knows? We do not know those answers, and we probably won't for a long time. So there's no way to put blame onto, oh, it was the contractor. Oh, it was this way too early to tell. There's no way to tell that right now.

[00:05:22] Eric Goranson: But the point is, is that they knew there were people there, and I think sometimes that cities are gonna have to come into a thing and go, Hey, look, we need to inspect these buildings maybe every five years, maybe seven years, and have a structural engineer go through. And take a hard look and see if we have issues.

[00:05:40] Eric Goranson: Now, there are always warning signs to buildings like water damage holes, cracks, things like that. Traditionally, without some kind of outside forces, you don't see buildings collapse on their own. Now, if you look, and that's, you know, in the United States, that's pretty common. You don't see that. Now, if you look at that [00:06:00] Surfside Resort or the Surfside condo in Surfside, Florida, that thing had hundreds of telltale signs that there was something going sideways.

[00:06:10] Eric Goranson: You had failed concrete, you had water leaks, you had all of those things happening, and those are things that are preventable a hundred percent. You just didn't have anybody that had the knowledge. Or the ability to say, Hey, we've got a big problem. So I think this is gonna be something that maybe we need to have a building safety committee, you know, for in a building department where they're out there taking a look and they're certifying these, at least let's start with the residential buildings.

[00:06:42] Eric Goranson: Let's start with the places where people are living. I think maybe we need to be doing some inspections on those to make sure that they are not collapsing. And if they've got water, if they've got sewer problems, then they can tag them and say, Hey, we need to help. And maybe the city needs to step [00:07:00] up and help some of these places that are more low income to keep 'em low income and invest into these buildings a little more, and help with some grants and things like that to keep these things safe and healthy.

[00:07:10] Eric Goranson: You know, we've got all these dollars that we're spending on energy grants and things like that. Why aren't we spending that on keeping these places affordable for people? That is another solution for this. So I think we've got some ideas here that we could go down to. But you look at that surf side, I mean, that was 98 people killed in a 40 year old condominium building that was completely preventable.

[00:07:37] Eric Goranson: So let's start having this discussion in our own cities, in our own counties or states or whatever, whoever's in charge of buildings in your area. Maybe somebody should be paying attention to these old buildings and coming up with an inspection process. Maybe it's a fire department. I don't know. Maybe they're doing a, you've got the fire inspector going around and doing building stuff.

[00:07:56] Eric Goranson: I don't know what the answer is, but I think that there's some easy answers out there [00:08:00] that at least we can put some people on to make sure, especially in these older buildings that might need a little of to save them. And that's what we got for this week of trying to prevent building collapses. Well, next week we've got a nice, fun thing coming out with around the house show that, uh, we'll be, uh, premiering.

[00:08:19] Eric Goranson: So stay tuned. I don't have the exact date yet due to my travel schedule, but uh, I've got some fun stuff we're gonna be doing. So stay tuned for that announcement coming up soon. And we'll be, uh, setting that up here shortly. I'm in the middle of that process now, so don't, don't be surprised to see a few little exciting, fun changes to around the house show that, uh, is gonna be really fun for everybody.

[00:08:42] Eric Goranson: All right, everybody, have a great rest of the week. We'll see you on Saturday. Thanks for tuning into around the house and don't forget. We've got around the House Northwest and if you want to catch our videos, we've got 75 of them up. Head over to Fox 12 in Oregon here. So, uh, at Fox 12, Oregon on YouTube and [00:09:00] we've got about 75 videos over there.

[00:09:01] Eric Goranson: Just look for the, around the house playlist. Thanks for tuning in around the house. We'll see you Saturday