Engineers studying the June 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfside are releasing portions of video that confirm the sequence of visible events, but still cannot say whether the failure that triggered the collapse - what they call the "initiating event" - occurred out of sight, including in the pool deck, the parking garage or in the tower.
The newly-released videos were played at a meeting Thursday of the National Institute of Standards and Technology advisory committee that has so far spent $30 million trying to understand why the condo collapsed, killing 98 people.
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They cautioned that their observations could change and they are not yet releasing findings or recommendations. But after more than two and a half years of evidence-gathering and analysis, including interviews with survivors, they say they are getting closer to determining exactly what initiated the collapse.
As was known since that morning, a portion of the pool deck collapsed before the tower, but the investigators say noises heard by some survivors in the tower minutes before the collapse raise questions about whether a failure of some sort in the tower or garage could have triggered the pool deck collapse.
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The videos provide compelling evidence the first major collapse was in the pool deck, one of the investigators said, but he cautioned that does not mean a smaller failure elsewhere did not initiate the series of events that led to the deck and, later, the tower collapsing.
Adding to their understanding have been a series of interviews with people who lived or worked in the building, including one resident who described hearing "knocking" noises, like a hammer, in the minutes before the collapse. Those noises grew progressively louder until he noticed part of the pool deck had collapsed.
"Having seen part of the building collapse, this interviewee was anticipating a freefall and pretty much getting ready to die,” said Emel Ganapati, one of the team leaders. "Luckily he and his family members survived the building collapse. They are with us today. Tragically, 98 souls are not."
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The panel also revealed that construction in portions of the tower section of the condo did not meet the building code requirements as they existed when it was built more than 40 years before the collapse. While construction drawings were done to code, the actual construction was not. And inspections were done not by the town of Surfside or other governmental entity, but rather by the engineer of record or his staff.
"We've discovered several places where the building did not meet the requirements of the drawings, the building code or common practice," said Jim Harris, one of the engineers leading the team.
Last year, the panel revealed portions of the pool deck also did not meet building code requirements, but now they’ve extended that finding to the tower – though they said the problems in the tower were not as severe as found on the pool deck.
"There was to the best of our knowledge inspection during construction for compliance with the design," Harris said. "Nonetheless things were missed,” he said, adding, that failure to build as required "is a key focus of what we are looking into."
