Federal investigators announced Monday that the Surfside, Florida, condo building collapse that killed 98 people in June 2021 began three weeks prior to the structure falling.
“Following an extensive technical investigation, the team has concluded that the collapse began in early June 2021, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed,” the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Construction Safety Team said in a statement.
NIST investigators said the initial column failures in the Champlain Towers South condominium caused “cracks to grow and loads to redistribute in the pool deck over the next three weeks.”
“This led to the larger catastrophic collapse on June 24,” the NIST safety team said…