Miami apartment building ‘sinking’ for decades before collapse
The Florida high-rise apartment building that “pancaked” while residents were sleeping overnight had been reportedly “sinking” for decades, an ominous report released before the disaster claimed.
As the search for 99 people who are missing – including a group of Australians – continues, it has also come to light that the tower was “creaking” so loudly in the days before the disaster that it was waking residents up.
The 12-storey beachfront building in Miami-Dade County – which was largely reduced to rubble in a sudden collapse yesterday – was built in 1981 and had been sinking into the ground since the 1990s, according to a 2020 study conducted by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University.
“I looked at it this morning and said, ‘Oh, my god’. We did detect that,” Wdowinski said.
His research focused on which parts of Miami were sinking, in an effort to determine what areas could be most impacted by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.
His team found that the Champlain
Towers South in Surfside had been sinking at a rate of about 2mm a year in the 1990s, the report said.
“We saw this building had some kind of unusual movement,” Wdowinski told the outlet.
However, the study focused on flooding hazards, not engineering concerns — and a mention of the “12-story condominium” appeared in only one line, USA Today reported.
“We didn’t give it too much importance,” Wdowinski said.
Meanwhile, Pablo Rodriguez, whose mother and grandmother are among at least 99 missing, said his mother called him to report “creaking noises” she heard a day before the building collapsed.
“She just told me she had woken up around three or four in the morning and had heard like some creaking noises,” he told CNN. “They were loud enough to wake her.”
Kobi Karp, an architect whose firm has worked on prominent Surfside and Miami Beach buildings, told The New York Times that the way the building had collapsed suggested a “possible internal failure”.
He said the internal failure may have been caused by “deterioration at the point where a horizontal slab of the building meets a vertical support wall” – which he said could cause one of the building’s floors to fall and take the rest of the building down.
Karp said that such a deterioration could have happened either slowly over years or suddenly if the structure of the building was unintentionally damaged.
Surfside town officials yesterday said the high-rise had been undergoing a county-mandated 40-year recertification process, which involves electrical and structural inspections.
City Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer told Miami TV station WPLG there were no issues with the inspection — and that a building inspector may have been on-site on Thursday.
“I want to know why this happened,” Salzhauer said. “That’s really the only question . . . And can it happen again? Are any other of our buildings in town in jeopardy?”