Clues emerge in Surfside condo collapse. The wait for information is agonizing, but critical | Opinion
It has been two long years since the middle-of-the-night collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo in Surfside — a moment that stunned South Florida and took 98 lives — and we still don’t know why it happened.
But more clues are starting to emerge, at long last. For those who lost someone at Champlain Towers, and for the all of us in the community, the information can’t come soon enough.
A preliminary summary of findings issued last week by investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology said the pool deck — which fell seven minutes before the rest of the tower on June 24, 2021 — was severely underdesigned, with “critically low margins against failure.”
That’s the same area that the Miami Herald’s reporting zeroed in on six months after the collapse.
Why would the collapse of the pool deck take down much of the tower a few minutes later? The summary doesn’t say, but the Herald examined that issue in detail in 2021. Researchers at the University of Washington, collaborating with the Herald to analyze the collapse, performed computer simulations that showed how the pool-deck failure could have started a chain reaction of problems spreading into the tower along the ground floor. Additionally, experts the Herald consulted said that when the pool deck fell, it would have put new strain on underdesigned columns — columns that weren’t designed well enough to withstand the load — along half of the tower’s perimeter, causing them to fracture and then collapse inward.
Weak pool deck
Glenn Bell, team associate leader for the official investigation, said the design of Champlain Towers South failed to meet codes and standards. The pool area was the worst, with the strength of the pool deck in some places only about half of what was required under the code in 1980.
At least one heart-wrenching anecdote backs up the pool-deck-first theory. Cassie Stratton, a resident of Champlain Towers South who did not make it out alive, called her out-of-town husband about 1:30 a.m. on the night of the collapse to tell him she looked out the window and saw a sinkhole where the pool used to be. Then the line went dead.
Investigators last week cautioned that they are considering two dozen hypotheses of why the building fell, but noted that the pool deck is the leading possibility. They said they’ve found no evidence of an explosion or other sudden event that might have caused the catastrophe — there was speculation about that at the time of the collapse. Their final report isn’t expected until about May 2025.
That’s still a long way away, and yet it’s understandable. An investigation of this kind is a huge undertaking. More than $18 million has been spent so far, and more than 600 pieces of evidence are being kept in two warehouses to test as needed. Investigators have spent an estimated 100 hours searching the debris for security video from the building when it collapsed and have interviewed 33 people. They’re examining the concrete used in the building, which one person on the project called “strong but not so durable.”
Last week’s summary of preliminary findings and public hearings was an important step. The families of those who were killed need answers. They need transparency and information. So does the rest of the our community and, really, anyone living in a high-rise.
But now is not the time to rush to conclusions or cut corners. The failure of Champlain Towers was a tragedy like nothing else we had experienced in modern South Florida, and what we learn from it will be critical. We cannot bring those 98 people back. What we can, and must, do is make sure this investigation yields the information we need to make sure that this collapse is the last one.
