ESCAPE FROM THE TOWER OF TERROR!
What happened when Florida condo collapsed
WHEN half of the 12-story Champlain Towers South Condo building collapsed like a pancake in a matter of seconds, 88-year-old Esther Gorfinkel was one of the lucky who made it out alive.
Esther, who’d lived on the fifth floor in the Surfside, Fla., luxury residence since it was built in 1981, had felt a shaking shortly after 1 a.m. on June 24, but chalked it up to bad weather thundering in from the ocean in the back — until an announcement warned over an intercom, in English and then in Spanish — to get out now!
The first emergency exit she reached was mangled shut so she rushed to another and found herself with about 15 others clambering down the stairs.
Luckily, they weren’t in the section where about 70 of 136 units — some with price tags as high as $1 million
GLOBE / July 19, 2021
— crumpled to the ground in about 11 seconds, forming a mound of concrete and steel debris more than 30 feet high.
Esther and her group of survivors splashed through a pool of water and debris in the lower garage and reached the beach.
Staring through the huge billowing smoke and ash plume that had been the 120-plus-feet building moments before: “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” she says.
They were lucky.
Three days later, teams of firefighters and expert rescuers from the Miami area and Israel were still searching for 151 occupants, including Orthodox Jews, well-to-do South Americans, retirees from the Northeast and visiting friends and relatives who were missing and believed buried alive.
Nicholas Balboa, who was visiting loved ones from Phoenix, turned into a hero while walking the family dog near the high-rise buildings at 1:25 a.m., along Collins Avenue.
“I heard a sound, almost like thunder,” he says. “I thought a storm might be rolling in.”
Suddenly, a chimney of dust rose between buildings. He made his way to the oceanside back of the buildings and was stunned by the wall of debris.
“It was like a mini 9/11,” Balboa says. “It looked like the World Trade Center. Just debris everywhere. Except this was a home — there were beds you could see sticking out of the rubble.”
About 2 a.m., stunned Balboa heard the voice of “a little boy” and spotted a hand waving from the hill of rubble.
Calling a nearby police officer, they climbed chunks of concrete.
“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,” the buried boy pleaded, adding that he was trapped with his mother.
“But I couldn’t hear her or see her,” Balboa says.
Rescue workers pulled Jonah Handler, 15, a junior varsity baseball player at Monsignor Edward Pace High School in nearby Miami Gardens, from his living grave and rushed him to a hospital.
They also got out his mom, Stacie Fang, but she tragically passed away at the hospital from blunt-force injuries.
By June 27, three days later, the death toll was ten, with
151 still unaccounted for, and structural engineering experts were pondering a variety of reasons for the building’s sudden collapse.
Incredibly, the tragedy didn’t have to happen, according to a 2018 report about dangerous damage that needed fixing.
An inspection by consultant Frank Morabito noted areas of “significant cracks in the concrete” at the lower
level and warned that the waterproofing underneath the pool deck and driveway entrance was “failing, causing major structural damage to
slab below these areas. “Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially … and therefore must all be completely removed and replaced.”
Morabito also slammed the original builders for failing to allow for a slope for water drainage.
Those repairs were never made, say sources, and the rest is a historic nightmare.