There are horror scenes in Miami where a high-rise tower suddenly disintegrated, but there were worrying signs before the disaster struck.
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 missing — including a group of Australians — continues, it had also come to light that the tower was “creaking” so loudly in the days before the disaster that it woke residents up.
The 12-story beachfront building in Miami-Dade County was vastly reduced to rubble in a sudden collapse on Thursday local time — it was built in 1981. It had been sinking into the ground since the 1990s, according to a 2020 study 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 told USA Today on Thursday.
His research focused on which parts of Miami were sinking to determine the most impacted areas of sea-level rise and coastal flooding.
His team found that the Champlain Towers South in Surfside had been sinking at a rate of about 2 millimeters 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 mention of the “12-story condominium” appeared in only one line, USA Today reported.
“We didn’t give it too much importance,” Wdowinski said, adding that he didn’t believe anybody in the city or state government would have been aware of the study.
Wdowinski’s research focused on which parts of Miami were sinking 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 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s, the report said.
Meanwhile, Pablo Rodriguez, whose mother and grandmother are among at least 99 missings, 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 3 or 4 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 might have been caused by ‘deterioration at the point where a horizontal slab of the building meets a vertical support wall’ – which he explained to the outlet could lead one of the building’s floors to fall and take the rest of the building down suddenly.
Karp said that such deterioration could have happened either slowly over the years or suddenly if the structure of the building had been unintentionally damaged.
Surfside town officials on Thursday said the high-rise had been undergoing a county-mandated 40-year recertification process involving electrical and structural inspections.
City Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer told Miami TV station WPLG that the process was believed to be proceeding without issues — and that a building inspector may have been on-site as recently as Wednesday.
“I want to know why this happened,” Salzhauer said. “That’s the only question. … And can it happen again? Are any other of our buildings in town in jeopardy?”
Kenneth Direktor, an attorney for the residents’ association at the Champlain Towers South condo, said the building had “thorough engineering inspections over the last several months”. What that tells you is…. nothing like this was foreseeable, at least it wasn’t seen by the engineers who were looking at the building from a structural perspective,” he told CNN. “There was nothing to indicate something like this was going to happen.”
