Surfside condo collapse began 3 weeks before tragedy

The partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo in Surfside started roughly three weeks before the building fell, according to federal investigators.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report Monday concluding that a structural failure first occurred at two critical garage column connections beneath the pool deck in early June 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported. That initial failure triggered an undetected, slow-motion chain reaction that ultimately claimed 98 lives, and the report confirms what many engineers had long suspected. Investigators found that when the slab-to-column connections failed, the pool deck’s concrete slab started to quietly […]

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