Team behind Miami Herald’s ‘Tragedy in Surfside’ stories wins Sidney Award
The team behind the Miami Herald’s sweeping investigation “Tragedy in Surfside,” on the deadly collapse of Champlain Towers South, was chosen as the Hillman Foundation’s February winner of the Sidney Award.
The national award recognizes excellence in journalism from the previous month.
“This is local news that’s urgently relevant to high-rise dwellers all over the world,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein. “The collapse seemed inexplicable until the Herald revealed a 40-year pattern of poor design, shoddy construction, lax inspection and inadequate maintenance.” The award is named for Sidney Hillman, a union leader who founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
The “Tragedy of Surfside” package, including an acclaimed 3D interactive called “House of Cards,” gave the Herald’s audience a much deeper understanding of the fall of the 12-story tower on June 24, 2021, that left 98 people dead.
Led by Miami Herald and McClatchy journalists Sarah Blaskey, Ben Conarck, Aaron Leibowitz, Eduardo Alvarez and Sohail Al-Jamea, the reporting interwove survivor accounts, security and body-cam footage, 911 calls, thousands of pages of structural drawings, permits and inspection reports and the results of sophisticated computer modeling to identify structural, maintenance and other factors that likely contributed to the collapse, which began in the pool deck area and propagated into the tower several minutes later.
The computer modeling was overseen by engineering professor Dawn Lehman of the University of Washington, who worked as a consultant for the Herald.
Blaskey, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, said the mission to learn everything leading to the collapse began that morning as the entire Herald newsroom was deployed, dividing into teams assigned to specific areas of coverage. The first public records request was submitted at 7:29 a.m. the day of the disaster. Many more requests would follow, with each document and each interview providing a piece of a still-emerging picture.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology will assign an official cause, a process that may take years.
The Herald’s coverage continues.
“Without a specific understanding of what went wrong, there would be no way to ensure that nothing like what happened at Champlain South would ever happen again,” Blaskey said.
This story was originally published February 9, 2022 at 7:21 PM.
