More than four years after a Florida condominium collapse killed 98 people, federal investigators have yet to make a final determination of the cause — but they do have some leading theories.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the agency handling the probe, said this week it hopes to conclude the investigation in 2026.
“We intend for our investigation of this failure to have a lasting impact, save future lives and ensure this never happens again,” NIST investigator Judith Mitrani-Reiser said in the agency’s latest report.
Most residents were asleep in the 12-story Champlain Towers South when the beachfront condo building in Surfside, Florida, collapsed into a huge pile of rubble at 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021. As the investigation continued, a Miami judge approved a more than $1 billion settlement for personal injury and wrongful death claims from the disaster.
Meanwhile, a new luxury condominium is going up at the Champlain Towers site, a few miles north of Miami.
NIST has zeroed in on what it calls three “higher-likelihood” scenarios, all related to construction flaws that date to the beginning of the 40-year-old structure.
“These conditions existed from the time construction was complete, 40 years before the partial collapse,” said Glen Bell, co-lead investigator on NIST’s National Construction Safety Team.
One possibility is the failure of a connection between a building column and the pool deck slab that never met building code standards. Another is that steel reinforcement “was not placed where it should have been,” which meant the column and pool deck were far too weak.
And a third theory is that work done later around the pool — when heavy planters, sand and pavers were added — increased the weight load on a deck “that was already functionally and structurally inadequate.”
The NIST report also notes that support columns in the building’s basement parking garage had been exposed to frequent flooding, which causes corrosion in steel reinforcements and concrete deterioration.
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Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
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