A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN?

The Champlain Towers South had many desirable features: It was on the ocean, it had a pool and a gym, and it was just north of trendy Miami Beach. “I was telling my mom how this place is great, the house is great, everything is great,” Gabriel Nir, who lived on the first floor, told the

Post. “But

Washington when you live there, you start to notice the small creaks and the small issues the building had.”

While no definitive cause had been determined for the 40-year-old tower’s collapse when we went to press, there were warning signs. The

New reported that

York Times in 2018, “a consultant found evidence of ‘major structural damage’ to the concrete slab below the pool deck and ‘abundant’ cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage,” which was located beneath the pool area. It was the pool area that collapsed into the garage, possibly adding to or setting off the collapse. The also

Times reports that “damaged columns at the building’s base may have had less steel reinforcement than was originally planned.”

Additionally, a 2020 Florida International University study found that the land on which the building stood had been sinking about 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s, although the rate may have changed since then. While the sinking land may have contributed to the building’s collapse, FIU Institute of Environment professor Shimon Wdowinski doubts it alone would have brought down the building.

If the Champlain Towers seems to have been a disaster waiting to happen, here is a silver lining: It could have been worse. Tourists and snowbirds tend to avoid Florida’s hot, humid summers, and many of the apartments had been shuttered until winter. Had the collapse occurred a few months earlier, there likely would have been more casualties.