55 units of a Surfside Miami 12 story 136 unit condo collapsed. Surfside, near 88th and Collins, very close to Miami Beach, has a large Jewish population. According to an article in USA Today, the cause may have been geological. The south wing of the 40-year-old building reportedly sank 1-2 mm a year in the 90's. Had this continued the building's south wing damaged infrastructure may have simply sheared away from the stronger wing bring and brought the adjacent wing down with it.
This weakness in the 12-story building was cited in a study in 2020 by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida State University. Over the past several years, Wdowinski and his team have researched which parts of the Miami area are sinking, primarily to identify where sea level rise and flooding could have the most impact. They obtained historical data from European satellites, which mapped the area by bouncing signals down to the ground and back to identify shifting elevations.
"Wdownski said he doesn’t believe anybody in the city or state government would have had a reason to be aware of the findings of the study. The bulk of it focused on potential flooding hazards, not engineering concerns. The study’s mention of the “12-story condominium” was relegated to a single line.
“We didn’t give it too much importance,” Wdowinski said."
The Washington Post had a video of the building's collapse, that took about 30-seconds. So far 100 people are missing and several deaths have been reported.
Video timeline: How the Miami-Dade condo collapsed
Surveillance video and photos of the Thursday morning building collapse in Miami show how t
