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

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 are confirmed dead. We analyze this collapse event using a video clip that is publicly available from social media. 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 method can quantify the falling structural components by intuitively showing 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 results would serve as the basis for further investigations of this and other structure collapse events.