After the Surfside Tower collapses, apartment dwellers outside Florida wonder if they need to worry

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“You know how much they charge at the hotel next door for one night? A thousand dollars,” Gold said, wearing a chauffeur’s hat over bespectacled eyes and a thick white mustache on his balcony and his wife, Sheila, next to him. “I have it here for free.”

“I am confident that this building is safe,” he said. “You know you have two families. I mean two brothers and the same genes. But they’re not the same. One could be a criminal and the other could be a doctor.”

But some of Gould’s neighbors and residents of other coastal properties in Florida and beyond aren’t so sure. They have been feeling anxious and tense since the June 24 tragedy.

Tom Skiba, CEO of the Community Associations Institute, said after a brief visit to Surfside after the meltdown.

Those concerns are felt outside of South Florida, where emergency re-inspections of other older buildings have led to the evacuation of at least four other apartment buildings deemed unsafe.

“Not just our organization but every industry professional, every board, every director got a huge number of calls. Just people asking questions: Could this happen in my community, in my building? Should I be concerned about it?” said Skiba, whose organization calls homeowners associations.

‘Some people are especially concerned’

While the cause of the Surfside collapse is still being investigated, the disaster has prompted a review of high-rise apartment buildings in the area.

“People are worried,” said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett. “Some people are especially concerned.”

One building in South Florida that has raised alarms is Crestview Towers, about seven miles north of the Surfside apartment. The city of North Miami Beach earlier this month ordered its immediate closure and the evacuation of about 300 people after a report confirmed the building was unsafe.

“What bothers me the most is that management has been aware of this since January,” Crestview resident Harold Dauphin said of the building’s structural and electrical problems.

Crestview Towers was deemed structurally and electrically unsafe based on a belated rehabilitation report for the nearly 50-year-old building, according to City Manager Arthur H. Sorey III.

Crestview’s attorney did not respond to CNN’s multiple requests for comment.

Suri said the report was dated January 11, 2021 and submitted on July 2. In it, an architect retained by the Architectural Association chronicled the building’s structural and electrical defects.

“As a resident, we weren’t aware of the situation,” said Estefania Gragalis, who also lives in Crestview.

In fact, Dauphin said he first learned of the evacuations when he was taking his 7-year-old from the camp. When he approached the house recently, he said he saw helicopters flying over the building and police going from floor to floor to assist with the evacuation.

“I understand the appeal,” he said of the eviction order. “It’s a great call to know what happened at Surfside. So it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

Before its collapse, officials had been visiting the South Champlain Towers regularly in recent years. Surfside Township inspectors conducted permit inspections at the condo tower more than once a week on average in 2018 and 2019, according to a CNN analysis of city records. But even as an architect hired by the condo council warned of “significant structural damage” to the property — and with residents squabbling over funding for expensive repairs — no record emerged of city officials raising red flags. Their job was to ensure compliance with permits for plumbing upgrades, air conditioning repairs, and window installations—not to evaluate the building’s structure. The Champlain Towers South Condominium, which is cited in lawsuits accusing it of failing to maintain the building, released a statement earlier this month saying: “Answers will take time as part of a comprehensive investigation and we will continue to work with city, state, local and federal officials in their rescue efforts. and understand the causes of this tragedy.

“What is the condition of our buildings here?”

Concerns about the structural integrity of high-rise apartment buildings extend beyond Florida’s 1,350 miles of coast.

According to the Institute for Community Associations, about 30 million people live in apartment buildings across the United States.

In New York, three state senators urged the state’s Building Standards and Code division to strengthen requirements for older tall buildings in coastal communities, including mandating annual inspections.

“We share some similarities with Florida’s high coast,” said New York State Senator Todd Kaminsky, a Long Island Democrat. “We ask ourselves the question: What is the status of our buildings here?”

In a letter earlier this month, Kaminsky and two other senators asked the department’s code development unit to reevaluate building standards in high-risk coastal areas.

“We hear from anxious voters questioning the structural integrity of their buildings,” the letter said.

There may be people who don’t like the answer.

Skippa said the rules for apartment reserves — or how much money councils must have to fix a building — vary by state. But Surfside’s collapse highlights the need for a fallback standard to address structural integrity.

“The reserve standards do not address structural issues,” he said. “They eat replacement items that would normally be eaten because of age or wear and tear.”

An independent budget review has warned the Champlain Towers South that its financial reserves are severely underfunded in the face of urgently needed structural repairs just over a year before the building collapsed, according to a document obtained by CNN.

Joel Figueroa Valens, a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, has expressed concern about hundreds of older properties in South Florida.

“We know there may have been no proper maintenance or quality control,” he said of the Surfside apartment building. “So let’s get out there. Let’s talk to the associations. Let’s try to check it out and then go from there.”

Allen Kilsheimer, an 80-year-old structural engineer and expert in forensic investigations into disasters like the Pentagon after 9/11 and the collapse of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University in Miami, is hired by the town of Surfside.

Kilsheimer surveyed the Champlain Towers North building, ordering tiles pulled from the pool deck and concrete samples drilled from the walls to conduct a series of tests that he hopes will explain why the Champlain South Towers collapsed.

“There is nothing I know so far here that tells me this is a symptom of condominiums in the USA,” he said.

His work is just one part of an intertwined investigation that includes homicide detectives, local prosecutors, and government engineers and may take years to complete.

“We’ll find out,” Kilsheimer said. “There may be people who don’t like the answer. But we’ll find out.”

The North Tower, sister to the South Champlain Towers, had the same design engineer and structural engineer.

“Same construction, same developer, same name, possibly same materials,” Burkett said.

Gold has lived in the North Tower since 1981, the year it was built, and was president of his condo association for a decade. He has no plans to leave even though several neighbors have left.

“I don’t blame them for going out,” he said. “Everyone has to make their own decisions. It’s like flying. Some people are afraid of flying.”

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