Video appears to show rubble in garage, water gushing just before Surfside condo collapse
A TikTok video posted Tuesday appears to show the north side of Champlain Towers South just moments before the building collapsed. The video, taken from across 88th street, focuses on the entrance to the garage, where water appears to pour from the ceiling and huge chunks of concrete can be seen covering the floor.
“The basement was the first to collapse!!!” the post said.
The video, first reported by ABC 7 in Chicago, was posted by Adriana Sarmiento who told ABC she was on vacation and swimming in their nearby hotel pool when she heard a noise and went to see what happened. In her comments on TikTok, Sarmiento said the video was taken at 1:18 a.m. on June 24. After publication, the Herald obtained the original video and verified the timestamp.
The building collapsed at 1:25 a.m., she said. Sarmiento didn’t immediately respond to the Herald’s request for comment.
The part of the parking garage shown in Sarmiento’s video was identified in 2018 by engineer Frank Morabito 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-Dade County Police Department is aware of the video originally posted on TikTok, according to an email from detective Alvaro Zabaleta.
“This is a very active investigation and [we] cannot provide any additional information at this time,” he wrote.
Other eyewitnesses also described seeing the pool deck fall into the garage below in the same general area where the rubble can be seen in Sarmiento’s video.
Sara Nir, a resident of Champlain Towers South, has said in multiple interviews that she was inside her ground-level apartment shortly before 1 a.m. when she heard loud “knocking” noises, followed by a noise that sounded like a wall crashing down around 1:14 a.m.
Nir told the Washington Post she ran to the lobby to alert a security guard, then heard a very loud boom and saw that part of the surface-level parking area and part of the pool deck had collapsed into the underground parking garage.
She said she ran back to her apartment to get her two children and the three of them ran from the building before it collapsed minutes later.
Another resident, Cassie Stratton, called her husband from her fourth-floor balcony telling him a crater had formed in the pool deck, her husband told the Herald. Then the line went dead. Stratton is among those still missing in the rubble.
This article has been updated. Miami-Herald staff writer Samantha Gross contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 30, 2021 at 2:46 PM.
