USA TODAY published a major investigation last week about the forces at work at Champlain Towers South, the 12-story condominium in Surfside, Florida, that crumbled to the ground on June 24, killing 98 people and leaving dozens more without a home.
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The partially collapsed Champlain Towers South condo is pictured in Surfside, Florida. The rest of the building was demolished shortly the June 24th collapse. |
Experts told USA TODAY
cutting corners on construction often accompanied money
laundering. At Champlain South, engineers noted an
incorrectly designed pool deck and improperly constructed
support columns. Money laundering might have meant that some
early buyers weren’t living in the condo building or
concerned with its long-term maintenance.
There’s troubling evidence that the building’s decay
emerged earlier and was ignored longer than previously
known:
Residents noted flooding in the garage in 1981, the year the
tower opened. By 1996, according to permits for the work,
contractors were making major repairs to the concrete in the
garage ceiling, the underbelly of the improperly designed
pool deck. In 2001 and 2015, a Champlain resident filed
lawsuits against the same concrete contractors, alleging
that cracks in the building’s outer skin had allowed water
to penetrate into their units. In 2016, as construction
rumbled on a new condo next door, a Champlain South resident
was shaken off a treadmill.
Many of these problems were addressed in isolation and
not as a major problem that could lead to collapse:
Issues like flooding, chipping concrete and vibrations were
seen as a series of seemingly small issues that, for
decades, nobody connected to the larger, more devastating
problem. It wasn’t until 2018, when an engineering report
laid out construction errors that investigators are
examining to determine if they contributed to the collapse.
Condo residents delayed repairs even after warnings of
major structural issues:
Even when engineers finally alerted residents to design
flaws that were causing chronic water intrusion and growing
damage to concrete, the arguments and delays over needed
repairs did not focus on safety but about the cost and
inconvenience of fixing the problems: During the building’s
final years, homeowners voted to delay a repair of "deep"
concrete deterioration near the pool, so they could keep it
open through the summer, a 2020 engineering document shows.
It was the first part of the building that caved, witnesses
said.
As building maintenance was deferred and problems
continued to crop up, the condo’s luxury designs and
high-end finishes became dingy and dilapidated:
People looking for top-tier beachfront living in Surfside
went to the newer places next door. Champlain South’s
biggest sale in 2021 came in May when a couple paid $2.8
million for a four-bedroom penthouse in the 40-year-old
building. By contrast, a three-bedroom at the 2-year-old
Eighty Seven Park condos next door sold for $9 million, more
than three times as much.
To understand how the building declined and fell from its
inception, "timing is key," said Nicholas Griffin, who wrote
a book exploring cocaine, the race riots and refugee crisis
in Miami in 1980.
“This is all going on at exactly the time they are putting
together the Surfside deal,” Griffin said. “So you can
imagine how far down the bottom of the list honest
inspections of potential building disasters would be.”
He paused.
“Seeds were planted that took 40 years to grow and then
collapse.”