A new video purports to show water gushing from the ceiling of the doomed Miami condo building’s garage while concrete debris litters the floor just seven minutes before it collapsed.
The video was recorded at 1.18am on June 24 and zooms in on the entrance to the gated garage beneath the north side of Champlain Towers South – behind which water rains from the ceiling as if blasted from a fire hose. The building was reported to have crumbled at around 1.25am.
The alarming footage was posted to TikTok by Adriana Sarmiento who told Chicago news station WLS-TV that she was on vacation with her husband at the neighboring Bluegreen Vacations Solara Surfside Resort when she heard a noise and went to investigate.
It comes amid concerns from a structural engineer that the swimming pool deck may have caved in first and brought down the rest of the building with it, as corroborated by witnesses who say that sections of the pool deck had collapsed into the garage below.
Allyn E. Kilsheimer, who is investigating the Champlain Towers South collapse for the town of Surfside, told The Washington Post that the pool theory – first described by the husband of a woman who is still missing and since verified by a second witness – is viable.
‘There is a possibility that part of the pool [area] came down first and then dragged the middle of the building with it, and that made that collapse. And then once the middle of the building collapsed, number two, then the rest of the building didn’t know how to stand up and it fell down also, number three,’ Kilsheimer said.
An engineer in 2018 noted ‘major structural damage’ to the pool deck area, in which the waterproofing was failing, and the underground parking garage which was riddled with ‘abundant’ cracking.
In Sarmiento’s footage of the garage, water is seen flowing rapidly from the roof as if from a source of significant pressure. She said she tried to notify residents about the danger but they thought she was exaggerating because ‘things like that don’t happen in America.’ Just minutes later the building fell.
At least 18 people were killed and 145 remain missing after the apartment block collapsed on June 24, a type of disaster unheard of in the United States.
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