Researchers from a government agency that investigated the collapse of World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 are already on-site at Surfside, Fla.
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Researchers from a government agency that investigated the collapse of World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 are already on-site at Surfside, Fla. A team from NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are in the preliminary stages of an investigation into what caused the apparent building failure in the early hours of last Thursday at the Champlain Towers South condo building north of Miami Beach. The agency is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST’s disaster and failure program has assessed the effects of the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Mo., and Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico in 2017, in addition to its World Trade Center inquiry. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said at a news conference Monday that she expects the agency’s preliminary study will find that a full investigation is merited. As a « fact-finding, not fault-finding agency, » Wasserman Schultz said NIST will be able to help Congress adopt changes in federal law to « make sure that when the structures are built, that something like this could never, never happen again. » That means possible changes to laws governing building construction and code enforcement. The investigation should also help answer questions the Florida Democrat says she’s been asked repeatedly: « How are we going to deal with the long-term implications of this? Did this only impact just this building? » « We have structures like this all the way up the coastline of the United States, » she noted. The death toll at Surfside rose to 10 on Monday, and the number of people unaccounted for is now 151.
