This might deserve it’s own thread, but putting it here for now:
US Soldiers publicly expose security protocols for nuclear weapons in Europe by using public flash card learning apps to help them memorize relevant details:
Bellingcat is often doing very interesting and unique work.
Is saw that, too, but this is a better article.
Yikes!
Yeah, I like bellingcat. They dig into things you don’t necessarily think about.
A condo has collapsed in FL, seemingly out of the blue. At least 50 people are unaccounted for.
Yikes: Here’s one (of many) articles:
There’s surveillance camera footage of it coming down. It reminds me of the footage of the Kingdome implosion in Seattle, which of course was a carefully planned demolition with no one inside and no one hurt. Very different here.
I will be very curious to see what the engineers / architects decide the problem was.
I know that when I lived in a highrise condo they had a massive special assessment shortly after I sold to fund a project to basically prop up the entire building and rip out and replace the foundation. The project had an 8-figure price tag, and the residents had to cough up roughly 10% of the value of their units to cover a special assessment that covered about half of the cost with the remainder coming from reserves.
But they were saying that it was only a matter of time until the entire building collapsed if we didn’t fix the foundation, so everyone felt like we had no choice. Thank goodness they figured out that there was an issue and got it addressed before tragedy struck.
How awful for the people in Miami. Even for the survivors, their lives will never be the same. And it sounds like there was a considerable loss of life as well. 
13 seconds of footage from inside the building from a motion-activated security camera in one of the units. The owners of this particular unit use it as a vacation home and left yesterday.
That is crazy. Article says 1 dead, 10 injured, 51 unaccounted for. I’d hate to be the structural engineer on that project right now.
Miami Dade police now say 99 people are unaccounted for
I was wondering how they could so quickly come up with a number unaccounted for. Do they really keep tabs on visitors to the point that you could realistically know?
Sad to see that the numbers are moving in the wrong direction though.
37 survivors pulled from the rubble, 11 transported to area hospitals. They can hear banging sounds.
God, be with the rescuers and those in need of rescuing.
I find it a little innumerate. There should be a maximum number of people that could be unaccounted for. And for every person accounted for, the number should go down from there.
So, IMO, the quickliness is the cause, and journalists are the suspects.
Now, an issue might be that there is no accurate list of people who lived there right before the collapse. Or, it’s at the bottom of the rubble.
We have a friend working surgical in Miami. He said a lot of victims are pouring in to his hospital.
My understanding is that a fairly high percentage of condo owners in the building used those condos as vacation residences. So while they know how many people owned condos (though not necessarily how many people would be with them, if they were occupying), they wouldn’t know who was there and who was somewhere else at the time of the building collapse.
But it wouldn’t just be people living there. Since it happened in the middle of the night you wouldn’t have to worry about carpet installers and cleaning ladies and Mommy And Me groups. But how many single residents were hosting their SO’s (who maintain their own residences elsewhere) for sleepovers? Was anyone using their unit as an Airbnb? Was someone hosting their brother & SIL & 2 nephews from Raleigh for the week? And the single Dad lives here alone but he gets his kids (who normally live with their Mom up in Tampa) for a couple of weeks around the 4th of July each year. They’re not on the list and everyone forgot about them at first because no one’s seen them in the building for months, but now that I think about it… it’s close enough to the fourth that it’s possible they might’ve been with their dad. Dad was found unconscious and we have no idea who Mom even is, let alone how to reach her.
Having been a board member of a high rise condo, I can tell you that we had a reasonably accurate list of residents. But the hot guy in Unit 601 had a revolving door of girlfriends, any one (or perhaps even two) of whom may or may not be spending the night. And the grandparents in 905 had their grandkids over for sleepovers a lot. And we know that unit 412 was in the section that was ok, but she was dating the guy in unit 1103, which was not. Who knows where either of them were sleeping last night as they might have been in their own units or both in his or both in hers. We’d have to thoroughly review elevator camera footage to try and figure it out if they don’t check in.
And of course, if the list was destroyed in the collapse then we wouldn’t even have a good starting point. Especially if the building manager’s office and the HOA President’s unit were both in the destroyed section.
While one would generally say “wouldn’t there be an electronic list, backed up in the cloud?”… I’m going to say that I’m creating a new thread just for the whole tower collapse stuff. Including whether they had (backed up) electronic records.
We’re talking about a condo HOA run by volunteers who happen to live in the building, not a big-name insurance company with billions of dollars of assets and a dedicated IT staff.
I was in a higher-end building, which meant higher average skills of the residents / HOA board. Our list was maintained in Excel by the building manager. There also existed a few printouts, including a pretty recent one at the front desk at all times. But if the front desk and the adjacent building manager’s office were destroyed then it’d be hard to get a good up-to-date copy.
It got posted on an intranet site periodically, but since no one ever used the site, updating that copy was a low priority for the building manager.
reminds me of this: Kramer tries to create a Utopian society when he puts up pictures of all the residents of his and Jerry’s building. Jerry doesn’t mind until the women of the building want to be greeted with a kiss. After Jerry objects to kissing hello, he’s vilified and nearly kicked out of the building."