Green Light at Surfside

Green Light at Surfside (a Dystopian Fictional-Allegory)

The light was still green at Surfside when the ice-cube-tray building progressively melted and collapsed at 1:23 am onwards - it was and still is green at the intersection of Engineering and Bureaucracy, with double green-lights on both street and avenue. But how long had the ice-cube-tray building been melting before the final collapse, and how many more are still a melting work-in-process?

At only a dozen or so stories tall, depending on whether sub-basement parking garages are considered “floors,” it wasn’t even one quarter of the height as tall as most of the newer ones being built-up - up the road in Sunny Isles Beach and elsewhere in SE Florida, United States. In the aftermath, the engineers visually inspected the columns, applied ground-penetrating radar, and looked for additional clues - beneath the ground, beneath the building - that might reveal the cause of the collapse. But it was the subsequent audits of other buildings, beneath the bureaucracy, on the same geographical barrier-reef (but under separate city-state political jurisdictions) where the green light turned red – that forced other building-closures, including the Central County Courthouse itself, though on the mainland - where the bureaucracy of litigation-mix separated the ice cube tenants from the ice cube building-trays.

Out of the soft-drinks cooler of Engineering-efficiency the ice cube tray was set vertically in the sand, but the Beach-Sign of Bureaucracy clearly defined the Engineering specifications. A neon-green light of City-Certified Professional Engineers lit this sign after dusk, after the warnings, and it was still on at the time of the collapse. Prior warnings were given to no avail, as the green-light was on and was interpreted as “anything vertical” as being OK and anything “in-process” as remaining true.

Not even The New York Times (NYT) three annotated color-coded maps identifying buildings under scrutiny could convince one that the green-light was red. Based on their date of construction and their height, NYT published in an in-depth report that revealed that the Surfside-collapse prompted a review of hundreds of older high-rises in southeast Florida, as the management of other buildings "ignored or delayed action on serious maintenance issues." Here the light was clearly green when it should have been yellow or even red.

Truth as Fiction and Fiction as Truth

From engineering defects to sinking sand-rate-differentials, quantitative “facts” are glossed over by qualitative bureaucracy – and so the green light prevails, or rather fiction prevails over truth. So-called “evidence” ranging from 911 reports immediately before the incident (of tenants reporting pool-level and garage roof collapses), coupled with years’-prior engineering-filings (indeed showing structural defects in the pool-deck as garage ceiling) were indeed dutifully “filed,” but to no avail. Work-in-process was sufficient enough of an explanation and remains the “truth” while the results of those filings in the form of a collapsed building purports “fiction” as aghast onlookers stare in disbelief still-thinking truth prevails over fiction.

As ice melts from the ice-cube tray, as sand sinks in different places and spaces at different speeds, so too does a large structure shift on a minute scale. Internal reinforcing-bar (re-bar) within concrete exposure to salt-water and corrosion are additional facts glossed-over, so-long as the paperwork is filed-correctly and in accordance with bureaucratic standards, bureaucracy as truth prevails over engineering specifications, where such findings in lack-of-quality remain only as fiction, since the qualitative bureaucracy is the only quality that prevails.

Destabilizing standards remain as “truth,” and prevail over destabilizing concrete, which as having been destabilized, becomes a fiction – an untruth incompatible with the truth of the bureaucracy. And so, the green-light remains for both– a green light for engineers to continue to express their findings in reports filed into the abyss of bureaucracy, while the bureaucracy remains also as a green-light for so-called work-in-process, until the work-in-process is indeed completed, or until the untruth fiction of within the filings actualizes itself into the tangible real-world.