‘Reality has set in': Families honor 98 victims of Surfside condo collapse 3 years later

It has been three years since the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside claimed the lives of 98 people.

As friends and family continue to grieve their losses, the town of Surfside honored the lives of those gone too soon with a torch lighting ceremony at 1:22 a.m. Monday, the exact moment of the June 24, 2021 collapse.

Surfside Vice Mayor Tina Paul along with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue came together to light the ceremonial torch.

Loved ones were also present as officials read the names of the 98 people who died on that fateful day.

Later Monday, the Miami-Dade Police Aviation Unit held a memorial flyover at Veteran's Park followed by family members and officials sharing remarks and remembering the victims.

"The first year, it was a fog, the second year the fog started lifting and the third year has been the most difficult because reality has set in, that’s how we’re living," said Ronit Felszer, whose son, Ilan Naibryf, died in the collapse.

Raquel Oliveira, who lost her husband and 5-year-old son in the Surfside condo collapse, spoke of the pain that remains for all the family members.

"Time is so relative, three years for many things seems a very long time, and still it feel like it was today that I got the news that I never return home and never see my family again, I’m still processing the thought I traveled one day and I never returned home," she said.

"I would say the pain is worse, and it’s not something you could ever prepare for, and as time goes on it starts to be more of a reality that you’re never going to see your loved ones again," said Martin Langesfeld, whose sister, Nicole, along with her husband, Luis Sadovnic, were killed in the collapse. "Standing in front of the hole that killed 98 people including my sister Nicky, 26 years old, and her 28-year-old husband, Luis, it’s hard, it’s hard to comprehend, especially when we don’t have answers, we still don’t know why the building collapsed."

What led to the collapse?

Back in May, for the first time, engineers who investigated the collapse went public with the evidence they say points to where the first failure in the structure occurred just minutes before the building came down.

Engineers form the Chicago-based national engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates were hired by the court-appointed receiver for the condo association to investigate the collapse.

On May 21, they released a webinar on their website detailing their findings.

Matthew Fadden, a WJE associate principal in the firm’s Fort Lauderdale office, told the NBC6 Investigators the cause of the collapse could not be laid to one thing or person.

“No, no. There never is with anything like this, right?” he said.

The engineers agree with preliminary reports from federal investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who have cited several issues: flawed designs that overloaded certain areas of the structure; construction that did not meet building codes; additions and modifications to the building over its 40 years that made matters worse; and the degradation of certain critical areas.

And, like NIST, the WJE team focused on the pool deck that witnesses said was the first part of the building to fail, some seven to 12 minutes before the first part of the tower collapsed at 1:22 a.m. June 24, 2021.

But the exact location of the initial failure has yet to be determined by NIST, which is expected to take another year or more to issue its conclusion.

In its webinar, and in an interview with NBC6 Friday, Madden laid out his team’s best conclusion.

“There were punching shear failures in the pool deck,” he said, “and that pool deck then applied loads to the building that then collapsed the structure.”

To demonstrate how punching shear works, he placed a pen beneath a sheet of paper and pushed the paper down – as gravity and loads would exert forces on a slab of concrete – until the pen punched through the paper, as a concrete column would in a punching shear failure.

And it was such a failure on the west edge of the pool deck where they think that the first failure occurred, pointing to two columns specifically: L-13.1 and K-13.1.

There have been many theories about the triggering event thrown around since the collapse -- everything from a heavy object falling from the roof onto the pool deck, to a car hitting a column in the garage, to corroded steel reinforcement breaking away from where the pool deck met the south retaining wall.

But, aside from NIST, Fadden and his colleagues – in the unique position of working for what remained of condo association itself -- have been closest to the evidence that led to their conclusion as of now.