What we’ll remember: What we lost in the Surfside catastrophe and how it changed us
Someone at a coffee shop, years from now, will say the word Surfside, and you’ll remember.
The word will trigger a flood of images and sounds and it will be June 24, 2021, again. It will resonate in South Florida the way it does when someone says Andrew and you remember a howling wind shearing off the roof of a house. The way the word ValuJet conjures aerial footage of crews searching for lost souls, picking through colored, twisted specks in the marshy Everglades.
The sudden, nighttime collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside will go down as one of the great catastrophes for a generation of us in South Florida. The wound is still fresh, just 30 days old, but already Surfside is in our blood.
We will remember rousing from sleep and reaching for our phones to scroll and discover the news: a condo had collapsed in a town near Miami Beach. We searched our memory for friends and loved ones who lived in condos, any condo, on a beach, any beach. Did they live in Surfside? We scrambled out of bed.
By 8 a.m., there was word of a survivor. And we remember having hope. A stunned Nicholas Balboa, visiting from Arizona and out walking his dog late at night, had run toward the ground-shaking rumble and arrived before emergency crews. He heard a boy’s cries. Yell so I can follow your voice, he called out to a towering pile of broken concrete and rising dust.
A hand poked through the rubble. And Balboa found Jonah Handler, 15, under a bed frame and mattress, the one he was likely sleeping on when the building gave way just after 1 a.m.
We remember thinking Jonah would be the first of many. They would later tell their stories, how they managed to escape miraculously, we thought. We did not know the boy would be the first and the last. His mother, Stacie Fang, 54, who would die later at the hospital, would be counted as the first life lost at Surfside.
When we think of the collapse, we remember the one part of the building that was left standing along Collins Avenue. And we think of the people who staggered to their front door, opened it to run, and instead found a 12-story free fall and salty sea air, choked with cement dust, where their neighbors should have been.
Marian and Alfredo Lopez froze at the edge of their sixth-floor apartment.
“That complete side of the building was not there,” Marian said. “The apartments were gone.”
And that made us think of the families. This wasn’t like a plane crash, where strangers’ lives ended together over a random longitude. These were neighbors, at home, asleep in their beds. When the Surfside tower collapsed, an entire neighborhood vanished into the dark.
Pallbearers carried the blue and white caskets of Marcus Guara and Anaely Rodriguez into St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on July 6 and set them next to a single white casket with pink and purple ribbons that held their daughters, Lucia, 10, and Emma, 4. Lucia was baptized in that church, two blocks from their oceanside home. Emma received her first communion there.
We will always remember them together in that photo, all of them in sunglasses and the girls radiant with gap-tooth smiles.
Memories of those neighbors flow together like a torrent. They weave a beautiful and terrible tapestry that reflected their community.
The entire Kleiman family. Jay, who flew in from Puerto Rico to stay with his Jewish-Cuban mother, Nancy Levin, who poured her heart into Shabbat dinners for the nearly 40 years she lived there. His newlywed brother, Frank, just next door, with his bride, Ana, and her son, Luis Bermudez.
Fabian Nuñez and Andres Galfrascoli, who flew from Argentina to bring their daughter, Sofía, to the beach for the first time.
Whole families were lost. And it made us think of our own families. We hear our children laughing in the next room, and we listen through paper thin walls and think of walls that crumble. We think of concrete. We think of dust. We think of their bodies covered in concrete dust.
For two weeks, teams of workers searched for their neighbors through that rubble. Against the physics of a flattened building, against the biological needs of a human body.
They gave it a name: The Pile.
All eight teams from Florida’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, three federal urban rescue teams, and squads from Israel and Mexico joined Miami-Dade Fire Rescue crews. They worked in 12-hour shifts that became 16-hour shifts at The Pile. A steady haze of dust shrouded the scene like a pall.
Rabbis and chaplains blessed the site. They prayed with families. They consoled the rescue crews who found only more death as the days dragged on.
We will remember the photo of the Israeli search team member, Col. Golan Vach, carefully carrying sacred Jewish texts found among the lives that had been lost. The picture went viral, particularly among American-Jewish social media circles. The subtext: Every part of this scene was being treated like it was a loved one’s. As part of Jewish law, sacred pages of the Talmud must not be discarded but buried.
“We are doing this with very much dignity, very much respect,” he said. “We are trying to do this mission the best we can.”
We remember the helpers. A kosher kitchen popped up the day of the collapse at the Surfside Community Center and soon had cooked thousands of hot meals for families of victims, evacuees and first responders digging through The Pile. They cooked non-stop throughout the night, for weeks.
“We decided we’re going to stay open and feed all these workers, all these people, all through the night, 24-7,” restaurant owner Eli Ginsburg said. “I want to take care of everybody out there.”
Those who visited the site will remember the memorial. A block west of the collapse, where fences kept out everyone but first responders and family, a tribute went up along the screened fence at the Surfside tennis center. Laminated color photos of loved ones with their names spread across the wall.
Families leaned their hands against these photos and wept, even as a devastating summer heat pounded down on them. Red Cross workers handed out water bottles. A woman, soaked through her gingham dress as she tried to hang an American flag, fainted in tears and heat stroke.
They left mementos so others would remember. Marina Restrepo’s Miami Dade Junior College diploma on a plaque. American and Puerto Rican flags. Rosaries and plush dolls. Candles with every saint and no saints. A child had drawn a photo of firefighters sifting through The Pile and had written in pencil: “I hope for the lost people.”
Meanwhile, the moaning of heavy equipment, clattering concrete boulders into metal containers, blew in from The Pile. It showered mourners in concrete dust, got into their eyes, and covered cars and sidewalks in a gritty silt. Rescue workers hung a simple black banner atop the mural: “Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Mourns With You.”
Across the street one afternoon, sweating through a white shirt and kilt, a man played “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. The music seemed like it would always be there.
That only made us recall the bitter silences.
Everyone stopped on July 2 when rescuers discovered the body of 7-year-old Stella Cattarossi, the daughter of a Miami firefighter who had kept vigil at the site for seven days and eight nights.
She was found next to her late mother, Graciela, who was living with her parents Gino and Graciela, while her sister, Andrea, visited from Argentina. A family friend had hoped that Stella and Graciela spent those last moments together. Mother and daughter were holding one another when rescuers recovered their bodies.
More than 200 workers stopped to salute as Stella was carried away.
“The quietness of the site, all the construction machines shut down, nobody making a sound, no concrete being moved, no metal sounds, nothing. Just the sound of the footsteps of them carrying her away. It’s definitely going to live in my mind forever,” rescue worker Nichole Notte recalled.
Two days later, on Independence Day, the remaining part of the Champlain Towers, swaying and unstable as Hurricane Elsa threatened, was brought down in a controlled demolition. Miami will remember watching the charges flash and the building lean, disappearing into smoke. Fireworks across South Florida were canceled that night.
And this reminds us of that terrible day when hope faded — when the missing became the dead.
Two weeks after the collapse, when every possible nook that could have held a soul had been explored, Miami-Dade Fire Chief of Operations Ray Jadallah told us there was “no chance of life.”
His words hung in the air. We had hoped the rescue workers’ heroism would be rewarded. That family supplications would be heard. We had hoped for divine intervention beyond hope.
“We have all asked God for a miracle,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said through tears. “To share this news to families this evening who are missing their loved ones was devastating.”
And this changed us. It made us angry.
Because instantly we remembered every fact that came out in the days and weeks after the collapse.
Engineers sent to inspect the building found “major structural damage” according to a now-infamous report — in 2018. Yet days later, Surfside’s chief building official had told residents the condo appeared to be in “very good shape.”
We will remember that condo boards — made up of laypersons, not experts — debated for years what to do with repair estimates that soared as high as $15 million, while eventually doing nothing.
History will remember, even if we do not, that the Champlain’s late developer fled tax evasion charges in Canada and built a mortally imperfect building here. For this, Surfside gave him the key to the city.
We will wonder whether we learned anything from this. Hurricane Andrew sparked the toughest building codes in the country. The ValuJet crash banned passenger planes from carrying explosive cargo. What such wreath will we lay at Surfside’s feet?
We will think about this when we look at the blue-sky void between two buildings on the beach, the Art Deco hotel to the north and the sleek structure of steel and glass to the south.
We will think about the boy who was saved. About his mother who was not. About rabbis praying over loved ones. About two little girls in a shared coffin. We will think about a mother and child meeting their thunderous fate together.
We will think about all of those who tried to save them. And those who failed them.
Somehow, when someone says Surfside years from now, we will remember it all.
Reporting from a team of Miami Herald writers was used in this report, among them Alex Harris, Bianca Padró Ocasio, Martin Vassolo, Joey Flechas, Samantha Gross, Sarah Blaskey, Aaron Lebowitz, Mary Ellen Klas.
This story was originally published July 25, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
