The collapse reconstructed: Ten witnesses describe what they saw and heard
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Seven minutes to collapse
Witness accounts, visible damage and a computer model offer insights into how a pool deck cave-in spread, resulting in the catastrophic failure at Champlain Towers.
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The collapse reconstructed: Ten witnesses describe what they saw and heard
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At 1:22 a.m. on June 24, Champlain Towers South catastrophically collapsed, killing 98. In a video from a nearby security camera, the north wing of the 12-story tower implodes in a matter of seconds, but a review of call logs and the interviews with 10 key witnesses reveals that the collapse began around seven minutes earlier with a localized failure on the ground-floor pool deck.
Here’s a timeline of what happened, and what each witness heard and saw.
‘Boom, boom’
Sara, Gabe and Chani Nir
Sara Nir and her children Gabe, 25, and Chani, 15, had just gotten home to their two-bedroom apartment on the first floor. They began to hear noises that sounded like their neighbor was doing construction work.
“It’s like one of those things like when you bang on the floor,” Gabe Nir told the Herald. “We thought like people were changing tiles or doing some flooring or possibly banging on the walls, people hammering something.”
“The funny thing is we just got home maybe 25 minutes before this happened and we didn’t notice anything at all. We drove in the garage. ... I went and parked the car in reverse. I went upstairs. I didn’t notice anything at all,” Gabe Nir said.
The family had been renting unit 111 since October 2020.
“At first it was like knocking sound. Like somebody is hanging pictures. It would stop. Then more knocking. Then it was more intense,” Sara Nir said.
Then came a particularly loud sound, she said.
“I was really mad and I left the apartment,” Sara Nir said. She knew the exact time.
“My phone was in front of me and I was checking my emails and messages and I thought, OK, I’m going for a few seconds to go to security,” Sara Nir said.
Shamoka Furman
Shamoka Furman, the guard, had heard the sound, too, but told Nir she thought it was the elevator.
“I heard like a boom boom but I thought it was the elevator because no alarms went off or anything like that,” Furman later explained to police. Her account is captured on the footage from the responding officers’ body cameras.
Nicolás Vázquez and Gimena Accardi
Argentinian soap opera stars Nicolás Vázquez and Gimena Accardi drove their car down the ramp into the underground garage.
“We came back from having dinner. I park the car as usual in the garage,” Vázquez said in a voice note he created on WhatsApp for his fans. “We heard a really really loud sound, but didn’t have any way to ... didn’t understand what happened.”
So the couple got in the elevator.
Pool deck collapses
Nicolás Vázquez and Gimena Accardi
“In the six or seven seconds that we went up in the elevator, the elevator moved, stopping in the lobby as usual and a really strong cloud of dust, a loud thunder began, as if a — we didn’t know what happened. We didn’t understand if it was a tornado, an attack. Something similar to a movie,” Vázquez said in his statement to fans.
Shamoka Furman
“Another boom boom comes. That’s when I heard a Throooom,” Furman said when she was recounting the story to police officers later.
Sara Nir
Sarah Nir was in the lobby talking to Furman when the deck collapsed.
“When I heard the big boom I ran toward the noise to see where it came from and I see the car deck, pool deck, everything collapsed,” she said. Nir felt like she was in a horror movie.
“I need to think fast. There’s no construction. It’s an earthquake,” she concluded.
“Earthquake!” she yelled.
Gabe Nir
Gabe Nir was still in the family apartment when the pool deck collapse began.
“I am in the process of eating my fish [dinner] and I just started feeling like this whole building start to move left and right,” he told the Herald. “It feels like whenever you move like a horrible table — the table you can fold and if you drag it from one side to the other. So it felt like that but like super, super intense.
“There was so much noise going on and the rumble and then all of the sudden you hear like the loud splash of concrete. You just hear a loud splash of concrete and then all of the sudden I see the dust of the concrete start to emerge in the patio doors,” he said.
Fire Alarm
Logs from the fire alarm system show an alert had been sent to the county’s emergency dispatch.
Sara, Gabe and Chani Nir
After looking out over the collapsed deck, Sara Nir knew she needed to move quickly.
“I ran straight back to the left and told the security to call the police and to pull the fire alarm,” Sara Nir said. “They say again in the report they don’t know who made the call to the fire department. ... They thought it really went off because of the situation in the building by itself. It wasn’t. I told the security pull the fire alarm so people will know and also so the fire department would come.
“I go back to the apartment to tell my kids. They were already out [of the apartment],” she said.
“I grabbed my sister and we start to figure that something was not right,” Gabe Nir remembered.
“My son said he saw lots of dust in the apartment and lots of things falling,” Sara Nir said. “I don’t know what was falling but it was really a lot of dust. Particles of wood, my daughter said.”
“I told them to come out, run because it was an earthquake. My daughter didn’t want to run. I said, listen, we’re running. I said again to the security to call the police,” Sara Nir said.
Nicolás Vázquez and Gimena Accardi
The actors jumped off the elevators into the chaotic lobby.
“We started to run along with three or four other people that were there. There weren’t many of us,” Vázquez said.
They ran out to Collins Avenue.
“We were consumed by nerves, obviously. And it was then that we just understood that part of the parking area had fallen, with many cars sunken down, [car] alarms sounding. And Gime makes me realize how close we were to not telling this story,” Vázquez said.
Shamoka Furman
The night guard didn’t evacuate with the others.
“I couldn’t leave. I didn’t feel right,” Furman told the Herald.
Furman called 911 reporting an “explosion” at 8777 Collins at 01:16:27 a.m., according to emergency call records from Miami-Dade County.
A minute later, she called again.
“Yes, ma’am, it seemed like here it was an earthquake here,” Furman reported to the 911 operator.
Adriana Sarmiento
Adriana Sarmiento was on the pool deck of the Solara Surfside Resort when the pool deck next door, which doubled as the ceiling of Champlain’s below-ground garage, collapsed.
“I sit in an open space in the [Solara] pool area and I feel a collapse — boom — and a puff of air, a wind kicked up, after the collapse of the roof of the [Champlain] parking area,” Sarmiento told the Herald.
“A wind came out of the garage because the area where we were was in front of the [Champlain] garage. We had a line of sight. This wind passed in front of me and moved the plants in front of me but didn’t move those where I was sitting or other areas,” she said.
“And car alarms began to go off. And the streams of water began. And I began to look around everywhere, and try to determine where the sounds were coming from because it was strange and I knew something was happening.”
Sarmiento crossed 88th Street to peer down the ramp into the parking garage of Champlain South.
“Then I see the roof of the parking area — practically all of it in pieces on the floor — and the broken tubes that were gushing water. I say to the people with me — my husband and the security for our hotel — I say this is going to fall,” Sarmiento said.
She took a quick video before backing away.
Janeth Rodríguez
Janeth Rodríguez worked as a home health aide in unit 909 of Champlain Towers. She was half asleep when the pool deck collapsed.
“I swore that it was like a wave, it felt like a wave, like when you go into the water and you feel like the waves are moving you like whoom, like that. At the same time, it also felt like a bomb, you understand?” she said.
Rodríguez went to wake the woman she cared for. “Miss Elisa, something has happened,” Rodríguez said.
“I am standing in front of her in her bed, as she is trying to get up the other one comes, even stronger,“ Rodríguez said. Thankfully, they were in the part of the building that survived the collapse.
Iliana Monteagudo
Meanwhile five floors above the Nirs’ apartment, Iliana Monteagudo was awakened by what she called “a supernatural force.” It was around 1:15 a.m., she said. When she went to the living room, she found the door to her balcony was open and she couldn’t close it.
“A higher force woke me up and led me to the living room, because I felt noises in the apartment and then when it led me to the living room. I thought the sliding door that faced the water [the balcony door] had been left open. And indeed it was open. I tried to close it and I could not, and it was that obviously the building had moved and the rail of what is the base of the door had come out of place,” Monteagudo said.
As she stood in her living room, Monteagudo started to hear loud creaking sounds, almost like ice breaking.
“I felt a very loud rumble, and when I looked to my right side I saw that there was a crack from the ceiling going down to the floor along the wall and that crack, as it advanced, separated the wall in two. That’s when my mind started talking to me and told me you have to go because this is going to fall,” Monteagudo said.
She ran out of her apartment to the stairs by the elevators. She was on the fourth floor when she heard the roar of the part of the tower to the north give way.
Cassie Stratton
Cassie Stratton called her husband, Mike, at 1:20 a.m. to tell him she thought they were having an earthquake.
“And I said ‘Gee, that doesn’t sound right. An earthquake there?’ ” Mike Stratton told the Herald. Cassie went to investigate.
“So she left the bedroom, walked down the hall, went into the living room and ... she said that she saw a sinkhole forming and it was coming toward the building and that there was water in it,” he said. “Then she expressed that she was glad she had taken our car into the dealership to get repaired because the basement garage was going to be flooded from the water that was coming into it from the sinkhole and she was glad our car wasn’t in there.”
“Then she says, ‘The building is starting to shake again,’ she screamed, and that was it,” Mike Stratton said.
Cassie Stratton died in the collapse.
The tower collapses
Shamoka Furman
Furman was in the lobby trying to contact residents to warn them when everything exploded downward around her.
“I can’t knock on everybody’s doors so everybody I was calling ‘get out get out get out.’ The next thing you know I’m telling them to do it, and —” Furman trailed off. She could not seem to describe exactly what happened next.
“The lobby where I was at, things broke around me. Things started to collapse around me. It didn’t touch me,” Furman told the Herald. Behind her “by the mailbox area” to the left of the elevators collapsed completely. The roof of the entranceway collapsed, preventing her from escaping through the front doors or valet window, she said.
“When I tried to escape out I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know what type of smell that was but I knew it was something potent,” Furman told first responders.
Iliana Monteagudo
“When I went out I had water up to my ankle and some thick wires that I was afraid would have electricity and they were going to electrocute me. At that moment, I saw the security coming out screaming and jumping from the lobby of the building saying that there was an earthquake, an earthquake. I told her no, it was not an earthquake. The building fell,” Monteagudo said.
“And she said ‘follow me, follow me.’ ”
Iliana Monteagudo
Monteagudo followed Furman out the back door to the pool deck.
“As I followed her, we had to go up some, like, a wall, about one meter, or higher than one meter,” Monteagudo told the Herald.
“I told her, I cannot climb, help me. And she told me give me your hands. Then I gave her my hands, and she pulled me up that wall.
Later I saw a very wide crack that I also had to jump, and she told me jump, jump.”
Shamoka Furman
“I had to jump to the garage but half of that’s gone so I had to go along the side of the wall to get to the second part of the garage. I helped a family but I don’t know who they [are]. I don’t know if they live there. I don’t know,” Furman later told first responders.
“I end up helping them across. I don’t even know how I made it out of there, through the grace of God,” Furman said.
Miami Herald staff writer Nicholas Nehamas contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 21, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "The collapse reconstructed: Ten witnesses describe what they saw and heard."
