Published on June 29, 2022
One year has passed since a condominium tower in Surfside, Florida, collapsed and killed 98 people in the early morning hours of June 24 — but experts, officials, and those who lived through the disaster say there’s still a long way to go to ensure the safety of other buildings in South Florida.
The devastation at Champlain Towers South was — quite literally — a wake-up call for many. “I couldn’t believe it. As a structural engineer, I could not believe that a building could just collapse without any external force,” said Dawn Lehman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington retained by the Miami Herald to help the newspaper investigate the collapse.
“There wasn’t a hurricane. You know, there wasn’t a wind storm. There wasn’t a flood,” Lehman said. “So I was very concerned. And I said to myself, ‘I don’t ever want to see this happen again. And I want to do everything that I can to prevent it from happening.'”
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Originally written by Soo Rin Kim, Jared Kofsky, and Victor Oquendo for ABC News.