The ‘Catastrophic Failure’ Subreddit Is Trying to Explain the Miami Condo Collapse

As rescuers continue to search through the rubble of the South Florida condo collapse where more than 150 people are still missing after five days, others have flocked to a subreddit called Catastrophic Failure to figure out why the building collapsed.

The subreddit, which is normally a depository for footage or images of infrastructure or machines exploding or collapsing, has taken a particular interest in trying to figure out why the 12-story building collapsed, like much of the rest of the country. In the last few days, several posts have been made trying to explain what happened, eventually coalescing around one master thread that’s thousands of words long and has been updated 16 times with public documents, reputable news reports, architecture drawings, video footage, and other publicly available information.

This is at least somewhat reminiscent of Reddit's investigations into the Boston Marathon bombing, which had disastrous results, or more recent investigations about the Tesla crash in Texas that killed two people or a subreddit called "Reddit Bureau of Investigations." In this case, however, Redditors aren't looking to fault a specific person or defend some corporation from media coverage it perceives as unfair, and are instead trying to figure out why the building collapsed.

This approach, otherwise known as open source intelligence, is very similar to the actual news coverage on the condo-tower collapse in such reputable outlets as the New York Times, which interviewed a couple of structural engineers who watched the same video footage r/CatastrophicFailure posted and asked them what they thought. One of the Times' graphics even illustrates the building collapse in a similar way as one posted in the subreddit a few days ago.

It’s tempting to finger-wag at people sitting on their computers investigating a complex matter of structural engineering that looks likely to have resulted in dozens of people dying, but even the experts are, as the Times put it, relying on "the video and some simple reasoning" to identify the supporting columns in the parking garage as the main source of failure, at least at this preliminary stage. There will likely be years of further inquiry into what exactly happened and who is responsible for the failure.