Yes, We Have No Bedrock

Either Jeff Ostroff or Josh Porter, I forget which, said at the beginning of his video, "No engineer in the world would have predicted this building would collapse." I believe that statement since I have read many engineers say similar things and that's a problem. It means that the whole worldwide engineering profession was dead wrong and 97 people are dead as a result. It means that what I have called engineering's "standard model"-- borrowing from Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the "normal science" of engineering--is confronted with an "anomaly" that the standard model cannot explain and which throws the entire science into "crisis." When a science goes into crisis the scientists reach for a solution to the anomaly that preserves the standard model. They start reaching for a drunk driver demolition derby in the parking garage, for "explosions"; they start reaching to attribute the CTS disaster to "unique conditions" (one of the guys today also). Those preposterous "reaches" mean that their standard model has no explanation, that the science of engineering today is in crisis.

Josh concluded his video with "NIST will uncover the secrets" and I concluded the last post by predicting that NIST would recommend/require a foundational "tray" for buildings in the tropics. Josh and Jeff are Florida engineers. After I finished the last post I searched Google videos again for "surfside condo collapse cause". I came across a July 1 video from "Construction Engineering & Failure Analysis." The narrator is an engineer, but not an engineer from Florida as the below stills amusingly reveal, for this engineer is befuddled that structures are built as they are down here. Take a look at his reaction. Maybe it’s just the Florida engineering science that is in crisis?

That's three times in the first 15 seconds!

Air! We got air! Sand. Sand and air. Oh, and water! If you put those three together does that add up to bedrock? :(

Apparently not. He concludes this 8:13 vid with, a fourth time,

It is easy to conceive the solution to the no-bedrock problem: artificial bedrock, the foundational “tray”. But I am not an engineer. For engineers: Conceive and implement your own artificial bedrock if you deem the foundational tray undoable, or see your science replaced.

Here's the video.