Allyn Kilsheimer, Surfside city’s hired investigator, has been collecting evidence about the fallen condo and its design and maintenance in search of clues that could identify who, if anyone, should be held accountable for its collapse.
“Here, to here, to here, to here,” he told the workers, tracing a square along a support structure built out of the building’s facade to indicate where he wanted radar testing done that would show the arrangement of the steel reinforcement beneath the surface. The gruff 80-year-old, a structural engineer and veteran of forensic investigations at catastrophes like the Pentagon post-9/11 and the collapse of a pedestrian bridge at Miami’s Florida International University in 2018, was hired by the town of Surfside, Florida, one day after a condominium collapse last month that’s left 79 people confirmed dead and 61 still unaccounted for. The north tower, a sister of Champlain Towers South, with the same design architect and structural engineer, has become his laboratory. On Friday, CNN accompanied him as he traversed several floors of the 12-story building, ordering tiles pulled up from the pool deck and concrete samples drilled from the wall of a fifth-floor apartment for a series of tests that he hopes will help to explain the disaster scene down the beach. “It’s one of the 13,000 pieces of the puzzle,” Kilsheimer said. As first responders worked around the clock to pull people from the rubble, Kilsheimer and a different set of investigators have been collecting evidence about the fallen structure and its design and maintenance in search of clues that could identify who, if anyone, should be held accountable for its collapse. The overlapping probes — involving homicide detectives, local prosecutors and government engineers — could take years to complete; and, any desire by survivors of the collapse or victims’ families for a criminal resolution will run up against a legal standard that makes charges in a case like this difficult to bring. The evidence at the investigators’ disposal is growing by the day. Scientists from Washington, DC, have used drones to take 3-D maps of the crash site and have tested the composition of the soil beneath it. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the lead federal agency investigating the cause of the collapse, has begun interviewing people involved in previous inspections of the building. And local police are sorting through more than 13 million pounds of concrete pulled so far from the pile. Among that debris, NIST investigators have tagged more than 200 pieces as potentially significant, authorities said Friday. After two weeks on the scene, Kilsheimer says he’s considering “all kinds of possibilities” to explain the collapse. A number of factors, from design flaws to material deterioration, could have weakened the tower before a “trigger” event sent it falling, he said. His team has investigated trigger theories that he thinks are highly unlikely, such as recent explosive tests carried out at sea by the Navy a few hundred miles from the tower. A car crashing into a pillar in the basement garage of the building is a more plausible trigger, he said, though no evidence of one in the weeks preceding the collapse has emerged as of yet.
