Deadly Florida condo collapse probe zeroes in on pool deck flaws as preliminary cause

Federal investigators have zeroed in on flaws in the pool deck as the preliminary cause of the 2021 collapse of a 12-story Florida beachfront condominium that killed 98 people.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology said in a report Wednesday that the Champlain Towers South pool deck began falling down at least seven minutes before the tower, suggesting the pool dragged the building down with it.

Glenn Bell, co-lead investigator at NIST, said detailed analysis and computer simulations “indicate that it is more likely that the failure started in a pool deck slab-column connection.”

Most residents were asleep when the building in Surfside, Florida, collapsed into a huge pile of rubble at 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021. As the investigation continued, a Miami judge approved a more than $1 billion settlement for personal injury and wrongful death claims from the disaster.

Surfside is located a few miles north of Miami. NIST said its final conclusions on the collapse will be released in spring or summer 2026.

The preliminary findings also showed the “building was in distress in the weeks before the collapse.” Among the indicators of deeper-seated problems were a door that dislodged from its frame, cracks in a wall where heavy planters were located and a gate that shifted and became jammed shut.

The day before the disaster, the NIST report says, water was leaking from a ceiling in the parking garage that had experienced numerous cracks and the flow “dramatically increased in the hours before the collapse.”