Miami condo collapse: Construction workers refused to fix building last year over fears it was too unstable

Documents show that when contractors inspected Champlain Towers last year, they said they couldn’t make the necessary repairs out of fear they might destabilize the building.

An October 2020 work summary obtained by USA Today shows that Morabito Consultants, which inspected the condo for its 40-year certification, found severe deterioration in the concrete and steel, particularly in the pool area.

However, full restoration work “could not be performed,” the company said, because it “could affect the stability of the remaining adjacent concrete constructions.”

Less than a year later, the building collapsed, leaving at least 18 people dead and 145 missing. The cause of the disaster is still unknown.

Experts say the damage uncovered by Morabito’s report is not enough to explain the collapse, but it does show how deeply vulnerable the structure was.

“There’s no way that a structural member that has sustained that amount of concrete degradation and corrosion has the intended structural integrity,” Dawn Lehman, a structural engineering professor at the University of Washington, told USA Today. “Its structural performance has been compromised. But that’s not the same as causing a building collapse.”

For the building to crumble, Ms Lehman said, something had to happen to trigger the collapse. That missing catalyst is under investigation, but local officials right now are focused on rescuing survivors.

“There was something obviously very, very wrong at this building, and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Charles Burkett, mayor of Surfside, Florida, recently told reporters. “But that’s, like I said, not today, not tomorrow, and not for a long time because our first priority and our only priority is to pull our residents out of that rubble and reunite them with their families.”

The rescue effort is now in its ninth day. The work was briefly suspended on Thursday due to concerns that the remaining portion of the building, which is still standing, might collapse, endangering the lives of the rescue workers digging through the site.

But by the end of the day, work had resumed, and Miami-Dade’s mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, said the remainder will be demolished to remove the danger.

“We’re proceeding with planning for the likely demolition of the building while the search and rescue continues as our top priority,” Ms Levine Cava said.