The Champlain Towers South collapsed a couple of weeks ago and it pushed everything off the front page. To me, that seemed sort of ghoulish and exploitative. Yes, it was a tragedy and I don’t want to downplay the horror of well over a hundred people dying in one awful night, but it was a specific tragedy. It was on the front page every day and presented as a cliff-hanger however we all knew, early on, that the missing people were not really missing, they were under the rubble and most of them, if not every single one of them, were not alive. But as I started to think about it, I’ve come to realize that that the Champlain Towers is an example of how we – we being almost everybody – treat a slow-moving disaster. In a way, Champlain Towers is a scale model of the way we are dealing with the Global Climate Crisis and, I fear, the end result will be similar.
Champlain Towers had been deteriorating for years with cracks in the concrete structure getting bigger allowing water to penetrate, causing flaking concrete and corrosion. It was something that the owners had been arguing about for years. We are all susceptible to wishful thinking and a large enough number of condo owners did not want to acknowledge the problems. They were worried that, if there really was a problem, or. even worse, problems, their property value would go down. They preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, there is no point in looking for problems. Eventually, as things continued to deteriorate, enough recalcitrant owners agreed on getting an inspection and, in October of 2018, the engineers issued a report which detailed numerous structural problems and pointed out that they were getting even worse and were potentially dangerous. On one level, everybody already knew that and the majority of owners who did not to hire a consultant in the first place were now worried about the cost of repairs.
It turned out that the repairs were going to cost a lot of money, something like $175,000 per condo, and nobody has that kind of money kicking around. Additionally, they found some city engineer who said that the building was safe, so starting the repairs dragged on with nothing happening.
Until it did.
I accept indeed that these thoughts are a metaphor. I am profoundly sorry for all those close to the people who died in the collapse of that building but I cannot grieve for them. I hope no-one will be offended when I say that today I am grieving for my little cat, Rafiki, who I cherished dearly and who died in the night.