Inside the turbulent origins of condo disaster
It was in the middle of summer in 1980 when developers raising a pair of luxury condominium towers in Surfside, Florida, went to town officials with an unusual request: They wanted to add an extra floor to each building.
The application to go higher was almost unheard-of for an ambitious development whose construction was already well underway. The builders had not mentioned the added stories in their original plans. It was not clear how much consideration they had given to how the extra floors would affect the structures overall. And, most galling for town officials, the added penthouses would violate height limits designed to prevent laidback Surfside from becoming another Miami Beach.
George Desharnais. Records show that the Surfside building department delegated inspections of the towers to the Champlain Towers builders, who tapped their own engineer to sign off on construction work. The town manager was unable to resolve the penthouse issue because, just as the issue came before the city, he was arrested on charges later dismissed of peeping into the window of a 13-year-old girl and abruptly resigned.
The development team itself had a dubious record. The architect had been disciplined previously for designing a building with a sign structure that later collapsed in a hurricane. The structural engineer had run into trouble on an earlier project, too, when he signed off on a parking garage with steel reinforcement that was later found to be dangerously insufficient.
The early 1980s were a freewheeling period for construction in the Miami area, known at the time for its uneven enforcement of regulations, but the Champlain Towers project stood apart both for the tumult that occurred on the job site and the brazenness of the developers behind the project.
Investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology are still in the early days of examining the building’s collapse. with an eye on the town was the lead developer of Champlain Towers, Nathan Reiber, who brought a grand vision to reshape Surfside’s waterfront at a time when the town was eager to find new sources of tax revenue to keep taxes low for full-time residents. As Reiber’s team filed for the first Champlain Towers permits in August 1979 with no 13th-story penthouses city officials were struggling with serious inadequacies in the water and sewer systems that had led to a moratorium on new development.
The Champlain Towers developers came up with a plan: They would provide $200,000 toward the needed upgrades, covering half the cost, if they could get to work on construction. The town agreed.
Reiber pursued the project even as he was dealing with legal troubles in Canada.
Rick Aiken, the town manager who later had to step down, said the Champlain Towers builders were constantly pressing the town to move faster on permits.
He told them that they needed to follow the rules, he said, adding that he could not recall any instances of the developers engaging in improper activity.
On Nov. 13, 1979, the town approved the overall plans for the project.
As construction got underway at the Champlain Towers sites, both at their North and South properties, turmoil was emerging and plans were changing.
By May, the project’s lead contractor, Jorge Batievsky, had resigned. He soon filed a lawsuit, although records from the case have since been destroyed and Batievsky has died.