Experts searching for cause of Surfside building collapse.
SURFSIDE —
A failure at the lower levels of the Champlain Towers South Condo in Surfside could be responsible for its collapsing to the ground in a heap, experts said Thursday. But it could take months to know for sure.
A portion of the condo tower collapsed at 1:20 a.m. Thursday at 8777 Collins Ave. The tower, built in 1981, was in the middle of a reinspection required in Miami-Dade and Broward counties for commercial and multifamily buildings when they hit 40 years old.
Contractors were working on the tower’s roof and another building was under construction nearby. Whether either of those factors were responsible is still unknown.
It’s extremely rare for a building constructed in this country to just fall down, said Fred Bloetscher, a civil engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
“I saw the video of it falling,” he said. “I don’t think we have enough information yet on what happened there, whether it’s a foundational problem or a failure in something in the concrete. It’s too early to really tell.”
Usually a building will stay standing unless hit by a hurricane or a bomb or maybe weakened by a sinkhole, he said.
“For a building to just collapse like that is very odd,” he said. “In this case there was no bomb involved and no earthquake. It’s very curious.”
A report released last year by a professor at Florida International University might hold a key to the mystery.
The building has been sinking since the 1990s, according to a 2020 study conducted by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University, USA Today reported.
The building was sinking at a rate of about 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s, and the sinking could have slowed or accelerated in the time since, the newspaper reported.
“That’s 2.5 inches in 30 years if it stayed at that same rate,” Bloetscher said. “That’s a lot. That could cause something like this. If you have a building that’s sinking, that’s a foundation failure.”
Greg Batista, president of an engineering and construction firm in Davie, said he was at the building in 2017 when his company was hired to do a small job on the pool deck. He didn’t notice any major problems at the time, he said.
When he heard the tower had collapsed, he figured it might have been caused by the roof work — until he took a close look at security video of the collapse.
“The video seems to show the collapse occurred at one of the lower floors or the garage area,” he said.
That could mean a column in the garage or one of the lower floors was weak.
“And that could have led to a domino effect where the rest of the building could fall,” he said. “But right now, at this point it would be conjecture.”