Dear Editor,
For those of you that were stuck in traffic for hours on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, you have me to blame for that . Indirectly perhaps, but nevertheless, my name is on the mailbox.
For those of you just getting home now and don’t know the story, at about 3:00 on Thursday afternoon the retaining wall that keeps my front yard from ending up in the middle of the link heading into Philipsburg blew out and my front yard did, in fact, end up in the middle of the road. I was really lucky. Nobody was driving by at that precise moment and there was no ancillary damage and no injuries.
We had to block the road for danger of further collapse and the [Ministry of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure – Ed.] VROMI guys and the police did as good a job as could possibly be done to mitigate the disaster.
It took 5 hours to make things even borderline safe, but lacking one piece of equipment the size of a house, we couldn’t finish. So, I parked my cars such that if any further collapse occurred it would crush my cars rather than any passer-by and we quit and reopened the road.
On Friday morning machine-zilla showed up and spent four more hours “safeing” the environment and that’s why you were all screwed up for two days.
Like I said, I’m really sorry about that, but all we could do was damage control and unfortunately, you paid the price. If any of you see me in a bar or restaurant, make yourself known and your first drink is on me. That goes for the police and the VROMI guys as well. Thank you for your spectacular efforts
Now, having said all that, there is a moral to this story and a very valuable lesson to be learned. The wall that blew out was probably at least 30 years old and some think more than 40. It was there before I bought the place and very much before anybody was really paying attention. The wall was complete garbage from the moment it got put up, whenever that was. Simple 8” hollow blocks with no filled cores, no reinforcing steel, no columns, no mechanical attachment to the footings, no ties to the strakes, nothing that would make it a real wall except in name only. I would say that the guys that built it were completely unskilled but that would be a terrible insult to all the other unskilled people doing this work.
Two children with baseball bats could have knocked this wall down. If I had realized this, I would never have bought the house in the first place, but in the end it was my responsibility to do my due diligence and I failed. But that’s not the point. The point is that when these bozos were putting up this wall that was supposed to protect people driving by, there was no competent inspector there to say, “Stop! Are you guys crazy? You are going to hold up half a hillside with a few drabs of mortar and some pretty plaster? That thing will fall down someday and kill somebody.”
VROMI didn’t exist in any formal guise in those days, so they certainly aren’t to blame.
But again, having said that, that was then and this is now. and I know this is a long way around to this, but for those of you that have been on Mars for the last two years, I am the person that has VROMI in court over the Sunwing/Planet Hollywood project. To be clear, I have no fundamental objection to the project as an entity. What I do object to is that it is proposed to be built to a completely inferior structural standard and that (pay attention here) VROMI doesn’t have the inspectors to make certain almost on a daily basis that critical aspects aren’t being built by the same guys that built my wall.
When you talked to the window and door manufactures after Hurricane Irma , they all said the same thing, “Very few of the windows and doors failed themselves. The vast majority of the failures were that the entire element blew out because they were installed so badly.” Why was that? Because there was no one there to watch a cat-5 window get installed with 3 drywall screws and some caulking and say, “That’s unacceptable.”
That’s all I am trying to get VROMI to do.
I want Sunwing/Planet Hollywood to be forced, in writing, to build to the Cat 5/Dade County standards that they keep saying they are doing (documents available for inspection) instead of the Cat 3 and Eurocode standards that they actually tell VROMI when no one else is listening. And I want VROMI to inspect the construction on a daily basis to make sure the place actually gets built like the engineers designed it.
Why is this important to me? Simple. The last two times VROMI approved designs and construction for the Great Bay Hotel roofs, those roofs blew apart at cat 2 levels and ended up in my living room to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. I would really like that not to happen a third time.
Thirty years ago, or whenever my wall was built, no one knew any better or cared. Now things are different. Or at least they should be. No more ticking time bomb walls or roofs, please. We have all had the lessons and we should know better by now.
Steven Johnson
