Champlain Towers Collapse

The Blame Game

In the early morning of June 24, 2021, Champlain Towers South, a 13-story condominium in Surfside Florida, collapsed without warning. For the past two weeks, rescue crews have been frantically searching through the rubble in search of survivors. As of this broadcast, 46 residents have been confirmed dead with close to 100 still being reported as missing.

Significantly, years before the collapse, a structural engineer had warned the condominium's board that the building was suffering from “major structural damage” and that there was abundant cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage underneath the building. Despite this grim assessment, the necessary repairs were never performed. It was only within the past few months, more than two-and-a-half years after the warning, that Champlain’s condo board finally secured a line of credit to pay for the multimillion dollar repair work.

In this episode of The Blame Game, we’ll try to answer the question of who’s to blame for the collapse of Champlain Towers South? Who’s legally responsible for what happened and the resulting loss of life? And to help us answer these questions, we turn to our guest, Michael Shilale, an architect with Michael Shilale Architects.

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