A Florida Condo Collapsed, Killing 98 People. The Cause Had Been Spreading for Weeks.
!Image 1: Estimated read time3 min read
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- A five-year-long investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Construction Safety Team has concluded that a combination of shoddy architectural plans and construction eventually led to the Surfside condominium collapse in 2021.
- The detailed analysis, with a final report forthcoming, describes how the collapse initially began weeks earlier when two connections between the underground garage columns and the pool deck failed.
- As cracks formed and loads redistributed, the pool deck eventually collapsed, damaging supporting columns in multiple sections of the building.
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Along Florida’s 1,350 miles of coastline, condominium towers rise over beaches facing the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Among them was Champlain Towers South, a 12-story building in Surfside, about 12 miles north of downtown Miami.
From the outside, Champlain Towers South, originally built in 1981, looked like all the other condominiums along the sunny Florida coastline, but behind the scenes, the structure was inching toward disaster. That avoidable catastrophe eventually struck on June 24, 2021, when two of the three sections of the condo—known as “Middle” and “East” sections—collapsed, killing 98 people. The tragedy shocked the nation and instigated one of the most complex investigations into the failure of a building ever undertaken by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Construction Safety Team. Recently, the team released an hour-long video detailing the findings of the technical portion of its investigation, including the analysis of physical evidence, historical records, and interviews. The report also includes two dozen modeled scenarios of how the building possibly collapsed.
While such a catastrophic error requires multiple points of failure, since buildings are usually overengineered to avoid a collapse like the one that occurred in Surfside, the investigators found that both architects and construction crews deviated from state building codes and regulations. Those flaws eventually led to the fatal tragedy.
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As NIST investigation co-lead Glenn Bell said in a press statement, the underlying causes were “first, severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day, but also some limitations in those codes and standards. And second, deviations in the building’s construction from the design drawings.”
NIST’s investigation began just days after the collapse in the summer of 2021, and five years later, the agency pieced together a reliable timeline of what happened to the building. According to the report, the collapse began in early June 2021, when two connections between the underground garage columns and the elevated pool deck above them failed. This caused cracks to form and redistributed loads too heavy for the ground floor pool deck area to sustain. The pool deck was the first component to collapse early in the morning on June 24, and when its main slab tore away, it damaged connections supporting the towers, eventually resulting in the demise of the Middle and East sections.
“When building structures are designed and built to required codes and standards, they have margins against failure, meaning they should be able to support much more load than they are expected to bear,” NIST investigation co-lead Judith Mitrani-Reiser. “In the case of Champlain Towers South, however, these margins against failure were too narrow from the start.”
The Champlain Towers South disaster prompted broader scrutiny of condo safety. In September 2021, _The New York Times_ reported that safety concerns had led to evacuation orders for four other buildings. Miami-Dade County also moved quickly to strengthen its recertification program, requiring inspections of buildings taller than four stories by structural engineers with relevant expertise. The victims’ families later reached a $1.2 billion class-action settlement, with no party admitting fault.
At 1:22 a.m. on Wednesday, June 24, 2026—exactly five years after the collapse—surviving family members and first responders gathered at the same spot to light a torch for those who are gone but not forgotten.
“We appreciate everyone who has helped with this work, including the survivors and the families of those who were lost,” Bell said in a press statement. “With their invaluable input, this effort will help make other buildings safer, help prevent tragedies like this from happening again, and help honor the lives of the Champlain Towers South victims.”
!Image 2: Headshot of Darren Orf
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.