What remains on the site of the Champlain Towers South condo building on June 15, in Surfside, Fla.Wilfredo Lee/The Associated Press
Two years after the deadly collapse of a Canadian-built condominium near Miami, a U.S. federal government investigation into the cause has zeroed in on the building’s original slipshod design and construction.
While the exact role of the Toronto-based development consortium in the problems at Champlain Towers South is unclear, the probe has discovered that the condo suffered from potentially catastrophic flaws from the start.
At least one other nearby building built by the same developers, meanwhile, has had to be shored up after engineers found issues in its design and construction, too.
Champlain South, a 12-storey, L-shaped building in the town of Surfside north of Miami Beach, partly imploded at 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021. Ninety-eight people, including four Canadians, were killed, and dozens more left homeless.
Previously, The Globe and Mail revealed that Nathan Reiber, the late head of the Canadian consortium, had a lengthy history of fraud accusations, while both Champlain South’s architect and engineer had previously engaged in shoddy building practices.
An investigation by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found that plans for the condo complex did not meet building code standards at the time it was built, between 1979 and 1981. In places, the concrete slab under the building’s outdoor pool deck was designed to be only half as strong as codes required at the time. Rebar in the slab was installed deeper into the concrete than it was meant to be.
This could have led to “punching shear,” in which the concrete and steel failed where the columns met the slab, causing the slab to come crashing down. According to video and eyewitness accounts, the pool deck was the first part of Champlain South to collapse, followed a few minutes later by most of the tower.
“Even absent any sudden overload or obvious initiator of a failure on that tragic night of the collapse, the condition that existed in the pool deck slab at that time represented a serious safety concern for the building,” Glenn Bell, the associate lead investigator, said in a presentation at NIST’s Washington-area headquarters this month.
A separate investigation for the town of Surfside has found evidence that construction of Champlain did not always follow plans the developers filed. Concrete slabs, for instance, appear to have sometimes been formed differently than the drawings show and some support columns seem to have been put in different places.
“There were portions of the building to be built with concrete in certain areas that weren’t built that way. There were places where some of the reinforcing steel, depending on how you read the drawings, might not have been exactly where it was supposed to be,” Allyn Kilsheimer, the engineer hired to lead the probe investigation, said in an interview.
Mr. Kilsheimer said he is still trying to determine how significant any of this was and is also looking for a proximate cause that initiated the collapse. He said he had “95 per cent” ruled out problems with the building’s foundation, an early hypothesis. “It sat there for 40 years. So what was the trigger? That’s what we’re searching for,” he said.
One NIST investigator, Jack Moehle, said there was no evidence so far of an explosion or a car crashing into a column in the building’s parkade, two possible explanations.
The NIST investigation is not expected to finish its work until next year, with a final report in 2025. Mr. Kilsheimer said he was still waiting on access to some of the building’s rubble for further tests before reaching conclusions.
A Globe report into Champlain South’s developers in 2021 showed that Mr. Reiber had repeatedly been accused of shady business practices, including defrauding partners and funnelling money out of a project before it declared bankruptcy, during a 50-year real estate career in Ontario and Florida.
Champlain South’s architect, William Friedman, was accused in 1965 of failing to meet code in his design of three buildings that were damaged in a hurricane. His licence was temporarily suspended for “gross incompetence” in relation to one building. He also faced allegations of “plan stamping,” in which an architect signs off on a developer’s plans without ensuring they are sound.
The building’s engineer, Sergio Breiterman, also oversaw a potentially deadly design flaw in a parkade in Coral Gables, Fla. According to a 1976 Miami Herald article, the building’s parapet wall showed signs of failure just months after opening because it contained only half the amount of rebar it was supposed to.
Mr. Reiber and his partners, as well as Mr. Friedman and Mr. Breiterman, have all since died.
The Globe found 19 buildings in the Miami area, Toronto and London, Ont., that were built by Mr. Reiber or other Champlain South partners.
In one of these, Champlain Towers North, Mr. Kilsheimer said he uncovered problems that had to be fixed. Mr. Friedman and Mr. Breiterman worked on that building, too.
“There were some things we found in the original design and construction that needed to have remediations done to bring them up to the current code. Column locations were different than in the drawings,” he said.
Mr. Kilsheimer declined to specify what exactly had to be done at the building, which was completed a year after Champlain South and looks almost identical. Last year, the local CBS affiliate reported that Champlain North had installed steel braces to shore up columns on several floors, including the parkade.
Whether the problems at either building can be directly traced to the Canadian consortium may never be known. NIST spokeswoman Jennifer Huergo said her agency is only investigating the “technical cause of the collapse” and “it is not in our jurisdiction to determine who might have been at fault.”
At the time Champlain South was constructed, Mr. Kilsheimer said, the process usually involved developers negotiating a price they would pay their contractors, who then made decisions on specific details.
“I don’t think any of us will know how that happened on this job with the developers,” he said. “They’re all gone and there are no paper records we can find that talk about any of that.”