Jun 26, 2021 3 min read

Residents of Washington could be excused for feeling a sense of deja vu Thursday morning when they turned on their televisions or fired up their computers to see what had transpired overnight.

That’s because newscasts were full of the news of a stunning collapse of a condominium complex in the Florida community of Surfside, located near Miami Beach. A portion of the 12-story structure tumbled to the ground at 1:30 a.m., when most tenants in the building had settled in for the night. As of Friday morning, four people were dead, but more than 150 tenants were still unaccounted for, making it a virtual certainty that the death toll would climb.

When interviewed on NBC-TV’s “Today,” Charles Burkett, the mayor of Surfside, said, “It’s hard to imagine how this could happen. Buildings just don’t fall down.”

The exact reason part of the building crumbled will, of course, take some time to determine. Constructed just 40 years ago on reclaimed wetlands, a study released last year said it was sinking. Some residents believed nearby construction might have weakened the building’s foundation. Some theorized salt water could have been the culprit. The structure had reportedly just been inspected.

The collapse of the building 1,150 miles away from Washington might well have stirred memories from four years ago, when the quiet of a summer morning in the city’s downtown was rattled by the collapse of the Montgomery Building on North Main Street. No one was killed, unlike in Florida, but one of the building’s tenants was trapped for nine hours under a refrigerator and fallen debris. She ended up being hospitalized for weeks.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to the United States’ substandard public infrastructure, the fact remains that some structures in private hands are also troubled. Many older communities are burdened by blighted buildings, or structures that can pose threats to individuals who live or do business within them. In the months after the Montgomery Building fell, city officials vowed to be more proactive when it came to inspecting buildings, and there’s no indication that they have not been true to their word. But many municipalities are trying to make sure buildings are safe with understaffed inspection offices and overworked inspectors.

In Bozeman, Mont., the city had such a shortage of inspectors that earlier this year developers were allowed to hire third-party engineers to carry out inspections. Two years ago, in Norwich, Conn., a city building official abruptly retired because of the growing workload and lack of staff to deal with it. According to The Day newspaper, he said in his resignation letter, “I am not comfortable signing certificates of occupancy or letters of compliance when I feel uneasy about the work that was performed or that public safety is being compromised.”

There are a lot of municipalities that don’t have much room for frills when it comes to putting together a budget. But building inspection shouldn’t be treated as one.