Are ‘Green’ Buildings Safe? Surfside’s Collapse Raises Questions

Buildings are one of the highest sources of carbon emissions in the U.S. and, therefore, new technologies and materials are being developed every week to address that challenge.  But, as our hearts go out to all the families and friends and colleagues of the residents of the collapsed Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, it’s fair to revisit the questions around how these new technologies and buildings materials are tested and certified for safety.

Since the United States Green Building Council, or the USGBC as it’s more commonly known, developed the LEED certifications that are the gold standard for sustainable, eco-friendly buildings today, I went to them for answers to some important questions and spoke with Elizabeth Thompson, Vice President of the USGBC and an architect with about 20 years of experience. Their LEED certifications are based on the collection of “credits” for taking specific verifiable steps in the building’s design, construction and maintenance.

ArchitectCore Materials: Better Concrete, Better Steel

Concrete, which seems to have cracked a great deal in the Surfside building before it collapsed, is the source of 8% of global emissions, due in part to the amount of fuel needed in the process of making its main ingredient, cement. As a result, there are new technologies being developed to replace concrete and/or cement, including using captured carbon dioxide (or CO2) or hydrogen.

But how do we know these new technologies are durable and will be safe? Thompson told me, ““Every architect and engineer knows the concrete slump test that you often do that in school and you sort of have this little container, and you learn that concrete has a curing length and cures best at certain temperatures. Any concrete new mixture, whether it’s embodied carbon or flyash or any other innovation in making concrete more sustainable one way or the other in terms of the material itself, those are all tested through a rigorous standardized process.” Using flyash also keeps it out of landfills.

The approach matters

Thompson also explained that a lot of hurdles can be overcome by having the construction and maintenance teams use an integrated approach, whereby experts in different aspects of the process – from architects to contractors to electricians to the folks needing to do the maintenance going forward – communicate directly and often.

This is a cornerstone of the LEED approach, Thompson indicated, so that issues often missed by one party, or opportunities that for a better solution, can be addressed up front.  Managing the building’s construction in this integrated way, Thompson said, could potentially improve the building, as well as possibly lower costs, because it could avoid the need to make necessary changes later that could have been made earlier.

Climate matters

Champlain Towers was apparently built on swampland, according to reports, and Florida is of course a very humid region. The 2018 building report that has been disclosed warned of “major structural damage” due in part to corrosion and cracks in the concrete, which raises questions about how the building’s construction was adapted to the area’s climate, among other issues.

“One of the creative challenges for architects of course, is, you’ve got all the hard surfaces of the building that interact with the environment, Thompson said. “And you get the opportunity throughout the design process, when you’re designing the wall system, the roof assembly, whatever the bottom floor, is the basement essentially, where are you letting vapor in and out, where are you keeping the weather at bay…So, it’s very important to think about how the environment and the local climate affect each of those surfaces.” She added that the corroded steel reported in the Champlain Towers would have reduced the building’s structural integrity. The LEED regional adaptations in their third-party ratings benchmarking system is designed to take regional weather challenges into consideration.  

Do sustainable building have preventative maintenance plans that would have caught these problems sooner?

The 2018 report about problems in the Champlain Towers clearly were not addressed in a timely fashion. Some of the many outstanding questions about this are whether or not putting in place the goal of meeting LEED certifications would have helped, and if so, how.

Thompson said, “LEED speaks to that in encouraging project teams in one of our credits in our operations and maintenance rating system, is around having a preventative maintenance plan…And often when you have a holistic maintenance plan, there’s more of an intention to notice those sorts of things.” She added that if you are trying to obtain or keep any sort of third party verification, and have to provide documentation to back it up, you are more likely to pay attention to these details and address them.

Are building codes likely to change as a result of Surfside’s building collapse?

The follow up actions Thompson expects to be taken across the industry include from the individual scale to the industry writ large. She expects that individual and institutional investors will take a second or third look at the maintenance programs in place in their own investment properties, and to “see a regular report and that there’s more communication about how things are going, and probably more accountability as well, so that people know who to call and know what to expect.”

“In terms of large scale, it may be that more codes and more benchmarking systems incorporate maintenance schedules and are more prescriptive about that,” she explained.

She also said that the USGBC may review “our neighborhood development rating systems or LEED for Cities [to see] how do we help cities that are experiencing significant cultural and climate-related events” For example, she’s interested in whether or not covid’s shutting things down for the better part of 18 months was a contributing factor in any way. “Maybe this maintenance program wasn’t working so well because of covid, people weren’t coming in and out of the building as much,” she added.

The big lesson

The big lesson seems to be, as Thompson put it, “We design to meet the extremes that used to be rare [but are occurring more frequently] more consciously.”

You can listen to Joan’s full interview with Elizabeth Thompson on Green Connections Radio podcast as of Friday morning, July 2nd, on any podcast platform.