More than four years after the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex in Surfside, Florida, that killed 98 people, federal investigators announced their preliminary findings on Tuesday regarding the cause of the tragedy.
Members of the National Construction Safety Team (NCST) Advisory Committee found that there were possible issues near the pool deck in the hours, days and weeks leading up to the June 2021 collapse, including a leak from the ceiling, a gate door being stuck and a vertical shift involving a gate.
"Recent work indicates that it is MORE LIKELY that the failure started in a pool deck slab-column connection than we considered in June," the presentation slides stated.
Associate Lead Investigator Glenn Bell acknowledged during the meeting that this has been a difficult investigation since there were “pretty widespread problems with the building, both in design and construction.”
"Our team has worked tirelessly to find the causes of this disaster and we are on the home stretch, but much of the very hard work of bringing about change is still in front of us," Bell explained.
Martin Langesfeld, who lost his sister and brother-in-law in the building collapse, told members of the committee Tuesday afternoon that the investigation into the tragedy has taken too long.
"Four years. 98 dead. Nearly $40 million tax dollars spent, and we still have no answers and no accountability. That should be the media headline," Langesfeld said over Zoom.
Champlain Towers South was an oceanfront complex just north of the Miami Beach city line. The collapse of the structure killed 98 people in the middle of the night on June 24, 2021.
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology preliminarily concluded that the pool deck started to collapse more than seven minutes before the building fell to the ground, according to the presentation released ahead of the hearing Tuesday. The presentation confirmed what was suggested in earlier media reports.
MORE: Pool deck, garage ceilings of collapsed Surfside building were problematic as early as 1996, documents showThe exact cause of the collapse has been under investigation in the years since the incident, but investigators have long focused part of their attention on the pool deck.
"At the time of the failure, the pool deck's slab-column connections had critically low margins of safety," the presentation notes. "The bulk of the critically low margins of safety was caused by design understrength and misplaced slab reinforcement."
Officials noted in their presentation that issues with the pool deck existed from the time Champlain Towers South was built more than four decades ago.
"The structure had low resistance to progressive collapse, allowing the collapse of the pool deck to spread into and throughout the middle and east parts of the tower," the slides added.
The federal probe into the collapse has been delayed several times. The final investigative report was previously expected to be completed in 2025, but that goal has since been pushed back another year.
"Families are still waiting for answers, accountability and actionable safety recommendations," Langesfeld told the committee.