Surfside, One Year Later

Daniel Gielchinsky, a lawyer, lives a few blocks away from the Champlain Towers, also in an aging oceanfront condo building. When he woke up on June 24, the normally bustling Collins Avenue was eerily quiet, with an occasional resounding siren. 

His mom texted. “Are you alright?”

When he learned what happened, Gielchinsky’s first thought was to remove his two boys, who were still sleeping in the next room and were due at summer camp in a few hours anyway. 

Over the next few days, the number of casualties ticked slowly upward, as more of the missing were confirmed dead. In the end, the final tally was 98, making it the deadliest building collapse since 1981. 

In Surfside, the next few months were surreal. Collins Avenue was blocked off, sirens blasted at all hours, and officials were constantly in and out of the cleared site, which was soon just a hole between luxury condominium Eighty Seven Park and the three-star Solara Hotel.

In the meantime, the reckoning began. South Florida officials called for audits and enforcement of existing building regulations, handing out violations and vacate orders over the next few weeks and months. A slew of revelations revealed that Champlain Towers South had been deferring needed maintenance for years, in part due to internal wrangling and a lack of reserves. In the meantime, surviving residents and family members of the deceased sued the various parties they felt were responsible for the tragedy: the Town of Surfside, the engineers who didn’t warn them, the developer next door, the security company, and condo board’s lawyers, and others.

Remarkably, in the space of a year, significant progress has been made on most of these issues. Florida passed condo legislation that will standardize building recertifications and require condo associations to hold the necessary reserves to properly maintain their buildings. The sale of the Champlain Towers site was decided in May after a monthslong bid process, and will be sold to Damac Properties for $120 million, with the closing expected in July. 

On the legal side, the myriad claims were almost entirely resolved in a way that was unprecedented in both the size of the settlement and the speed of the resolution. The day before the one-year anniversary, the judge overseeing the legal proceedings, Michael Hanzman, gave his final stamp of approval to a $1.2 billion settlement for the victims that had been initially agreed to a month before. 

Hanzman was the driving force behind the case’s accelerated timeline, in what would otherwise have been a lengthy and painful process.

“He was so active and so aggressive about moving the case,” said Gielchinsky, who represented a Surfside official early in the proceedings. “He said to all of us, ‘If you are going to ask me for continuances and adjournments, don’t take the case. This case is not for you.’ ”

The $1.2 billion settlement was in addition to the sale of the site, and a separate $96 million settlement with unit owners who lost property but not loved ones. Individual payouts will be decided beginning in July. 

“We can’t compensate these people, and I recognize that,” Hanzman said June 23, before approving the final number. “But it’s the best we can do.” 

By the time the condo reform was passed in May, many real estate owners and developers were already taking matters into their own hands. Asi Cymbal, a Surfside resident and the owner of Cymbal Development, said his company implemented new safety procedures in the aftermath of the collapse. Cymbal Development, which recently merged with DLT, is vertically integrated and does its own construction. Currently, Cymbal is developing the Raintree River Residences in Fort Lauderdale, which will rise 28 stories, and the mid-rise Oasis Pointe Residences in Dania Beach. 

“We hired a safety overseer on construction sites; it’s to have another pair of eyes on top of our existing safety protocols,” he said. “We hired a shell specialist in-house, who oversees the shell construction.” 

Cymbal also lives along the waterfront, a few blocks north of the Champlain Towers South. After the collapse, all the buildings on the sand hired engineers to inspect their buildings. His own building used the services of Pistorino and Alam Consulting Engineers, the company that was involved in the forensic investigation at the Champlain Towers. 

But the work didn’t stop there. Maintenance and shoring work for older buildings has continued throughout the year. 

“No one’s moved on,” said Yaniv Levi, the owner of Coast to Coast General Contractors, a firm that specializes in concrete restoration and other maintenance needs. “No one is messing around right now with these structural projects. People are throwing work at us.” 

Some of his work is preemptive, but other jobs are in buildings that require immediate attention, or that have received violations from their local building department.

Right now, Coast to Coast is working on half a dozen jobs where buildings require emergency shoring, all because of violations from municipal building departments, Levi said. They’re mostly along the coast: in Miami Beach, Bal Harbour, Bay Harbor, Sunny Isles and Aventura. There are also some jobs out west in Dade County. “Poor, urban areas that have been neglected,” as Levi described them.

In some cases, owners are throwing in the towel. In two condo jobs that Levi was bidding on, the owners decided to sell to developers instead of investing in the needed repairs, he said — a pattern that has led to an increase in condo terminations. 

A third job, which Levi is still working on, is at the Castle Beach Club, an 18-story condominium building in Miami Beach that was once called the Playboy Plaza Hotel because Hugh Hefner invested in it. Condo owners in the building are weighing an offer from Related Group and 13th Floor Investments to buy them out for $500 million. The 570-unit building, which was hit with violations from the City of Miami Beach, required $10 million in repairs.

“In the meantime, they’re paying me to do the building,” Levi said. 

Castle Beach Club was built in 1966 and is home to the Russian & Turkish Baths, a favorite spa among locals. The spa has been closed since August, when an engineer hired to prepare the building for its belated 50-year recertification found concrete damage in the garage, the Miami Herald reported.

The 55-year-old condominium is not an outlier in Miami. Many buildings are over 40 or 50 years old, and most were built before 1992, when a raft of safety codes were implemented following Hurricane Andrew. Until the Florida legislature passed its post-Surfside condo legislation, maintenance of these buildings was mandated by a set of hopscotch laws that differed from county to county. 

In Miami-Dade, buildings were required to undergo a recertification after 40 years, and then every 10 years after, but enforcement was minimal. In fact, Champlain Towers South was facing its own 40th birthday last year, and the condo association was in the middle of the bid process to begin long-delayed repairs when it collapsed. Given the state of disrepair, it would have been unlikely to meet the recertification requirements in any case.

The new law requires a recertification at 30 years statewide, and then every 10 years thereafter. 

Gielchinsky, founding partner of DGIM Law, said the legislation was long overdue. “These buildings are built in an environment that’s difficult for buildings to last: You have salt, water, wind, rising sea levels coming up from underneath,” he said. “There has to be some accountability that things are being maintained.”

The law also addresses the issue of condo reserves, which contributed to the disrepair at Champlain Towers South. While condo associations are required to keep a minimum amount in reserves, condo boards can vote to waive the required contributions each year, which most did, leaving them without the funds to make needed repairs. This portion of the law will go into effect in 2024.

The final determination from the various teams investigating the cause of the collapse are not expected to be released for months, or even years.

But given the state of Champlain Towers South, the issue of its waterfront location seems to be missing from most discussions on the issue, other than its contribution to the wear and tear.

Buildings along the coast are now built at a higher grade to account for current water levels and king tides, Cymbal said. Older buildings all have pumps and other solutions to intermittent flooding. 

“It’s the way of life here,” said Levi. 

Despite all the progress, a year is not a lot of time to process the loss and grief that the survivors, family members and entire community of Surfside suffered. 

Gielchinsky worked from home in the months following the collapse, in a space in his garage. The ring of sirens was so constant that he eventually got used to them. 

“Til this day I think I hear them,” he said.