SURFSIDE — The
thunderous bang that jolted Jonah Handler and his mother in
the middle of the night last June was followed by silence.
Jonah, 15, and his mother, Stacie Fang, went out to their
terrace and looked up, thinking the ominous sound had come
from the roof of the 13-story Champlain Towers South
condominium in Surfside, Fla. But standing on the 10th
floor, they could not see anything wrong, so they settled
back down for the night.
All was quiet. No alarm blared. No evacuation order came.
But the condo tower was on the precipice of collapse.
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The collapse happened around 1:22 a.m., when most residents were asleep. |
The performance of the building’s automated fire alarm
system remains one of the many frustrating questions still
unanswered 12 months after the collapse. With seven minutes
elapsing between the time of the pool deck failure and the
catastrophic fall, could some of the residents who slept
through the initial boom have been able to make their way to
safety?
In the portion of the building that eventually collapsed,
nearly everyone was killed, including Jonah’s mother in Unit
1002. Jonah, pulled from the rubble, miraculously survived
with 12 broken vertebrae.
He said he never heard an alarm of any kind, and no alarm
can be heard ahead of the collapse on any of the audio and
video recordings that have emerged in the wake of the
disaster.
Jonah’s father, Neil Handler, who was not in the building,
said he was convinced that with seven minutes of warning,
Jonah, his mother and any number of others would have been
able to escape.
“I just think of all the lives they could have saved,” he
said.
On Thursday, Judge Michael A. Hanzman of the Circuit Court
in Miami-Dade County gave approval from the bench to a more
than $1 billion settlement involving insurance companies,
developers and other parties tied to Champlain Towers.
Securitas, a company with a global footprint that was hired
to help ensure the security of the building, paid the
largest portion of the settlement — more than $500 million.
Before the emotional hearing began, the judge held a moment
of silence to honor the victims. Relatives and survivors,
sitting quietly in the courtroom, passed around tissues.
Securitas said in a statement that its participation in the
settlement did “not reflect responsibility for the collapse
of the building or the tragic loss of life.”
‘You press one button’
High rises have various ways to notify tenants of an
emergency. Some older structures may have a basic fire alarm
system that blares through the units. Many towers built in
recent decades have added speakers so residents can get an
audible command and a description of the crisis.
In the lobby of Champlain Towers, with its gleaming floors,
recessed lighting and potted plants, a security desk
contained the controls to a network of speakers that had
been installed in every bedroom in 2017 to ensure that
residents could be roused if an evacuation were needed. “All
call” commands could be issued through a microphone at the
lobby control panel.
“You press one button, it would power up every speaker
throughout the building,” Matthew Haiman, who led the
company that installed the system at Champlain Towers, said
in a deposition. “You grab the microphone, you say: ‘Hey,
guys, there’s an emergency, get the heck out of the
building.’”
Had the system been used properly, he added, “then it
probably would have saved more lives to be honest with you.”
Ms. Furman, who had been a Champlain Towers security guard
for four months, said in an interview that she received
minimal training when she was hired, with another security
guard explaining the contours of the job while they stood
for an hour in the lobby. She said she never learned about
the “all call” button. The other guard declined to comment.
Andre Vautrin, a manager with the security company
Securitas, said in a deposition that his company never
trained the security guards at Champlain Towers how to
operate the panel and implied that the condo management
association oversaw the building’s security protocols.
A lawyer for families of the victims, Judd G. Rosen, queried
further: “Do you agree with me that a reasonable security
company should train its officers how to use a system that
can notify all the residents of an impending disaster?”
“Yes,” Mr. Vautrin replied.
‘We decided to run’
The loud noise that brought Jonah and Ms. Fang to their
balcony in the initial stages of the disaster also awakened
Paolo Longobardi on the third floor. Thunder, he thought.
But his wife, Anastasiya, had heard something more
unsettling: an unnatural, metallic crunch.
The two of them, groggy with sleep, peered out the sliding
glass door of their bedroom overlooking the pool. Below
them, the pool deck was caving in.
“It was disappearing into the ground,” Mr. Longobardi said.
“It was like a wave coming from the right to the left — from
the south to the north — and it was falling.”
Around that time, the building’s alarm system was starting
to activate, first at 1:15:29 a.m., when it signaled
“trouble,” according to a data log. Seventeen seconds later,
a fire alarm triggered. It sent out an automated alert to a
monitoring company, though it is not clear that it generated
an audible alarm on any floor. Soon after, a staff member at
the monitoring company notified 911 that a fire alarm had
been activated at Champlain Towers.
But even as initial signals of trouble were transmitted to
the monitoring agency and then to the authorities, few
people in the building were notified of what was happening.
The building’s default alarm system was not designed to
alert every resident. Rather, an alarm that triggered on one
floor was also supposed to set off alarms only on the floor
above and the floor below. It remains unclear which alarms
in the building went off that morning, and most survivors
reported hearing no alarm. This included some of those who
lived near the ground level of the building, where the
initial failure occurred.
As he watched the pool deck collapse from Unit 309, Mr.
Longobardi, a civil engineer who builds bridges for a
living, thought a huge sinkhole might be swallowing the
parking garage beneath the deck.
“We decided to run,” he said.
The Longobardis woke up their two children, ages 14 and 9,
and ushered them out the door. Mr. Longobardi said one of
the children recalled hearing an alarm during the escape.
In Unit 111 on the first floor, the Nir family, who had not
yet gone to bed, also saw trouble at the pool deck and ran
for the lobby. Gabriel Nir said he did not recall hearing a
fire alarm, but his family urged Ms. Furman, the security
guard, to call 911.
Ms. Furman dialed. The first call came in at 1:16:27 a.m.,
41 seconds after the fire alarm had been triggered.
“A big explosion,” she reported. No alarm could be heard in
the background of the call.
‘There was silence’
Six stories up, in Unit 611, Iliana Monteagudo awoke from
her sleep, worried that she might not have closed her
balcony door. Sure enough, it was open.
But as she went to close it, she found that the door was
stuck. No alarms sounded in her room, but she could hear the
sound of car alarms in the distance. Then she heard a
crunching sound and saw a crack growing down from her
ceiling.
“Run,” a voice in her head told her.
Ms. Monteagudo, 64, slipped out of her nightgown and into a
dress — “Don’t waste time putting on a bra,” the voice told
her — and sandals. She blew out a candle of the Virgin of
Guadalupe, grabbed her keys, purse, credit cards and pill
box, and ran out the door, being careful to turn off the
lights behind her.
Out in the hallway, Ms. Monteagudo, who had moved into the
complex six months earlier, was struck by how quiet things
were. She assumed that the units around her were largely
vacant. There was no alarm.
“There was silence,” she said. “There was no movement.
Nothing. I thought the building was empty.”
With silence on their floor and no sign of a building in
distress, Jonah and his mother returned inside their unit.
He climbed back into bed to go back to sleep. She sat on the
edge of his bed.
A little after 1:22 a.m., nearly seven minutes after the
fire alarm system had triggered, the collapse turned 13
stories into a heap of rubble.
Mr. Nir was on a call with 911 and ran to safety. Ms.
Monteagudo managed to reach a stairwell before the building
fell around her, climbing out with the help of the security
guard.
But Jonah and his mother never left his bedroom.
The floors of Champlain Towers pancaked on top of one
another, leaving just inches between some of them; a rescuer
later told Mr. Handler that the concrete on top of Jonah
formed an A-shaped frame over his head, which is what
probably allowed him to survive. A man walking by saw
Jonah’s arm poking out of the rubble and fingers wiggling.
He and another bystander alerted emergency workers.
The rescuer told Mr. Handler, who provided the account of
Jonah’s survival for this article, that Jonah and Ms. Fang,
who was 54, had been found holding hands.
“When he was separating them, they didn’t want to let go of
each other,” Mr. Handler said.
Mr. Handler said that after that day, Jonah suffered from
paralyzing fear when he heard sounds that reminded him of
the collapse — especially thunderstorms. Mr. Handler
sometimes has to drive his son around for hours until it
stops raining.