Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "jeffostroff" channel.

It's not just this, but as sea levels rise and the sands get washed away, even safely constructed and maintained buildings may wind up having major issues.
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@mattbrawner7888 This is part of why China requires that their buildings be torn down after 50 years. It's partially a reflection of the rapid growth and partially an acknowledgement that a lot of the standards weren't being properly met.
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A common analogy used for risk analysis in many fields is to consider it a bit like a stack of risk factors. One or two risk factors and you're probably not going to have a problem but as they stack up higher and higher they get more and more stable and eventually topple over. You can't address every possible risk factor, but if you do address enough of them, you can be sure that you're not going to be having something like this happening.
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@jeffostroff It's the lenses. Notice how the columns in the left and right of the beam aren't straight. If you do a correction of the image to make the columns parallel, you should get a more accurate sense about the beam's curvature.
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The problem is that if you're not an engineer, it's not always obvious what is and isn't a problem. And, the owners themselves only see a small portion of the building, mostly just their area and the common areas. I've got cracks in my unit, but they're fine, they happen whenever there's sagging over time, but I live in a much, much smaller 4 storey building, so I have far less to worry about as only 1 floor worth of stuff could possibly fall on me, and even that is rather unlikely as the building has been inspected recently.
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It would be a matter for whatever insurance is covering the building and if the HOA didn't bother with it, then the residents would be out of luck. The insurance you get as a resident is either renter's insurance or insurance on the unit itself depending on whether you rent or own the unit. It typically just covers the things in the unit, not necessarily the unit itself, but that would be laid out in whatever coverage documents are involved in the policy. The building I live in is insured by an HOA policy for anything that happens tot he actual building, but the stuff in my unit is covered by a renter's policy. If the building did fall down or otherwise become uninhabitable, then I'd probably be out of luck while looking for somewhere else to live.
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That's mostly because it's easier to avoid single points of failure. When multiple weaknesses combine, it gets increasingly tricky to predict. Especially back when computers were limited.
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Honestly, that's just a normal thing for living in one of these buildings if the HOA dues aren't high enough to cover foreseeable repairs. The building that I live in has had a new roof and painting done in recent years of a similar magnitude. The real question is whether they get on top of things early enough to keep the costs minimal, or they wait until it gets extremely expensive/impossible to fix.
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Interesting, my balcony has fake tiles as in a tile pattern pressed into the thin shell of concrete. The actual bit is extremely thin, and the building itself is only 3 storeys tall, which is probably why they could get away with it. If you don't look closely, it looks like tile work, but if you look a little closer it's real. I'm guessing this is a large part of why they went that route rather than tilework.
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@jeffostroff I'm in roughly the same part of the country, and when we had the siding done last year, the contractor that the HOA used to redo the balconies was able to put tile looking impressions in the concrete that was being used. The original balconies were made of concrete for the top with wooden supports and from the looks of it, the balconies are lighter now than they were as they have thicker plywood under the concrete than before, but the floor itself is the same height, this leads me to suspect that they were able to shave a bunch of weight with improved materials that weren't available in the '70s when the building was built. The earthquake risk in the area combined with the buildings being relatively short is probably a large part of why they went with wood rather than steel or concrete for the rest of the building.
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@jeffostroff You can make something fool proof, but you can never make it damn fool proof.
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