Investigation of condominium building collapse in Surfside, Florida: A video feature tracking approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a computer vision-based method to analyze the Surfside condominium collapse by tracking structural movements in social media videos, offering new insights into the failure process.

Contribution

It introduces a novel video feature tracking approach for structural failure analysis, enhancing investigation capabilities beyond human visual interpretation.

Findings

Quantified falling structural components during collapse

Mapped directions and magnitudes of structural movements

Demonstrated potential for forensic structural failure analysis

Abstract

On June 24, 2021, a 12-story condominium building (Champlain Towers South) in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed, resulting in one of the deadliest building collapses in United States history with 98 people confirmed deceased. In this work, we analyze the collapse event using a video clip that is publicly available from social media. In our analysis, we apply computer vision algorithms to corroborate new information from the video clip that may not be readily interpreted by human eyes. By comparing the differential features against different video frames, our proposed method is used to quantify the falling structural components by mapping the directions and magnitudes of their movements. We demonstrate the potential of this video processing methodology in investigations of catastrophic structural failures and hope our approach may serve as a basis for further investigations into structure collapse events.