The Towers and the Ticking Clock
On a bright afternoon in June, James McGuinness arrived in the lobby of Champlain Towers South, one of the tallest condo towers in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach. Like its sister building, Champlain Towers North, the South tower was built in 1981, in the midcentury modern style so beloved by Florida developers of the era: squat and unlovely, with an L-shaped Duplo block footprint and heavy concrete balconies that jutted from the 13-story structure. Out back, there was a garden, and beyond the garden, the sea.
Although McGuinness had been the chief building official in Surfside for less than four months, he knew Champlain Towers South well. And not only because he lived in an apartment complex nearby: Between late May and late June, he made four previous trips to Champlain South, where the condominium board was upgrading the building’s “swing-stage supports” — the roof-mounted anchors used by professional window-washing crews. This trip, on June 23, would be his fifth and last.
“In retrospect, you look back at that moment — you search your memory,” McGuinness told me recently. “But I didn’t notice anything unsafe. I would never have stayed up there if I had.” Together with the building manager for Champlain Towers South and a trainee from Surfside’s building-inspection unit, McGuinness walked the perimeter of the roof, assessing the anchor placements. The day already felt uncomfortably hot, and the breeze, blowing at 15 miles an hour toward the ocean, did little to make things more pleasant. They said their goodbyes and rode the elevator back to the lobby.
Around 1:45 a.m., McGuinness was awakened by the buzzing of his mobile phone on the bedside table. The voice on the line belonged to Jason Greene, the assistant town manager for Surfside. There’d been an incident at Champlain Towers South. “Partial collapse, multiple fatalities — that’s all he could tell me,” McGuinness said. Outside, the air was choked with smoke and particulate debris as fine as snow; emergency vehicles were shrieking up Collins Avenue, the multilane thoroughfare that runs almost the entire length of Miami Beach.
McGuinness rounded the corner and felt the air leave his lungs. The building upon which he stood the previous day had nearly vanished. In its place was a heap of concrete and steel. “There was this tremendous gap in the horizon staring back at me,” he said. “An unspeakable scene. Unspeakable horror. That’s all I could think, even then: It was unspeakable.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/28/magazine/miami-condo-collapse.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxfs9gGPzNiGeVTdcwqNPW9LavB-UIvAzIN460D2JRdlMd7ouTflzi-RYOUBqDgKvpp-NgI8IZSUprIb5FkUH46XwZ5Fquzn7cjv-b-Z52LClthmaMSa9RqyP2CBxIAtjvcczJVm13SFflbOWEbN3xoMtifglBZ8pRG8CYzKY_KW9U2UIM9WGbhjf6Ac3SrsZDWmVxYjAnupGJAZCClvGT2d94XI96b5cOdAVNKX8Jn0waZa0wOVRWiEzctDfV9BmTJPUlr5qrbfMtRWPrcG0zPw9H61e16jW8A702LcfknIsl0KnWZYo5w&smid=url-share
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I was able to read the article on my Samsung tablet. It is a long article and takes a while to load. I wasn't able to get past the opening pages until my fourth attempt. It is very much worth reading. The article encapsulates so much of the basis for the problems of our society: corporate greed and dishonesty, corruption and graft in local government, people unable to pay the costs of housing ( the endless 'gift' of supply-side trickle down economics), a population brainwashed into believing that safety codes and practices required by government, excuse me, Gummint 
, are an infringement on their freedumb, and spiced with rising ocean levels and stronger storms. I particularly found the Surfside mayor to be a real piece of work. It sounds like he would rather promote whack-a-doodle conspiracy theories than do anything which might upset conservative business interests. Why does he see enforcement of building codes as too demanding? Just...wow. Thank-you, Zorro, for sharing this article.