New video from minutes before the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, shows water streaming into the basement level garage. The video was taken by Adriana Sarmiento, who was in a nearby hotel pool at the time.
Video shows a stream of water spilling into the basement level garage of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, only minutes prior to its partial collapse in the early hours of June 24. https://t.co/cON8A7LpWV pic.twitter.com/uC0FibDByo
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 1, 2021
“The part of the parking garage shown in Sarmiento’s video was identified in 2018 by engineer Frank Moabito as having major damage to the concrete slab above. The damage, he wrote, was caused by a design error that caused the waterproofing on the pool deck to fail, allowing water to seep into the concrete and corrode the internal rebar,” The Miami Herald noted.
Other witnesses to the building’s collapse reported seeing the pooldeck plunge into the garage. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Allyn E. Kilsheimer, a veteran engineer investigating the incident, told the Post, “There is a possibility that part of the pool [area] came down first and then dragged the middle of the building with it, and that made that collapse. And then once the middle of the building collapsed, number two, then the rest of the building didn’t know how to stand up and it fell down also, number three.”
“Of more than a dozen experts interviewed for this article, including nine structural engineers, most agreed that the collapse appeared to involve a failure at the lowest levels of the building or in the parking garage beneath it. In images of the rubble, four experts saw indications of ‘punching shear failure,’ in which concrete slabs that make up the floors of a building detach from the structure’s vertical support columns,” the Post added.
“Work at the site of the condo building collapse in Surfside, Florida, was halted early Thursday due to concerns about the part of the structure that is still standing, officials announced at a press conference. Operations halted shortly after 2 a.m.,” CBS News reported on Thursday evening.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Thursday evening, “We’re proceeding with planning for the likely demolition of the building while the search and rescue continues, as our top priority. This is a decision that we need to make extremely carefully and methodically as we consider all the [possible] impacts to the pile of debris and to our search and rescue operation, as well as considerations of how to best manage the demolition in order to [safeguard] the integrity of the existing debris field,” CNN reported.
Earlier in the day, Levine Cava stated, “Our fire rescue team has been working around the clock, as you know, since this fateful building fall and we needed our engineers on-site to evaluate the safety of the standing structure. I am grateful to their hard work that got us back to work on the search and rescue as soon as possible. And we are continuing, of course, to assure that we do everything to protect our first responders. We will continue to search feverishly as we have done all along in the parts of the collapse that we currently have access to.”