The National Institute of Standards and Technology has now released its technical findings about the Champlain Towers South collapse. 1 For many, this will be read as an engineering report. For me, it is more than that. I served as the court-appointed insurance coverage liaison counsel for the class of victims. I listened to families, saw the grief, and worked with extraordinary lawyers and professionals who were trying to bring some measure of justice to a tragedy that never should have happened.
NIST’s findings are surprising and sobering. The collapse did not simply begin in the dark early morning hours of June 24, 2021, when the world watched in horror as a portion of the building came down. According to NIST, the failure began weeks earlier, in early June, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed. Those failed connections transferred loads to other parts of the structure that were not strong enough to carry them. The pool deck slab eventually broke away from the building, damaging two connections supporting part of the tower. All this allowed the failure to enter the tower and spread. Its findings read like the condominium was a diseased building in its final stages.
The most troubling lesson is that the disaster appears to have been both sudden and not sudden at all. The final collapse happened in seconds, but the structural failure was apparently announcing itself for weeks. The building may have lacked adequate structural safety margins for four decades.
I always thought of the Champlain Towers as a fragile building. Anything and everything happening to it was leading toward this disaster. That does not mean every condition was equal in a legal or engineering sense. It means that when the building was built with inadequate margins, exposed to coastal corrosion, altered over time, loaded further, and then allowed to age with known signs of distress without proper maintenance, it becomes less a building than a countdown to disaster.
Engineers will debate details of punching shear, load transfer, slab-column connections, corrosion, dead loads, and original design standards. They should, because this is how safer buildings are made. But the larger lesson should be that buildings do not forgive complacency. Concrete does not care about budgets, board meetings, deferred maintenance, reserve studies, or wishful thinking. Gravity is always on the clock.
One point from NIST should be understood by every condominium board, property manager, insurance professional, engineer, and lawyer dealing with older structures: A building can look habitable while quietly losing its ability to stand. The warnings may not come as sirens. They may come as cracks, leaks, corrosion, odd sounds, spalling concrete, unexplained water intrusion, or reports buried in minutes and maintenance files. Those should not be overlooked but questioned as to why they exist and what should be done about them.
On the first anniversary of this tragedy, I wrote about heroes in Heroes Arise From the Champlain Towers Condominium Collapse. I still believe the first responders were the first heroes. They went into a scene that no training can truly prepare a human being to face. I also wrote about the lawyers who worked to bring about an extraordinary recovery for the victims and families. In my firm, Shane Smith worked closest with me and equally as hard on this case. I remain humbled by that work and by the grace shown by family members we represented who had suffered unimaginable loss.
The release of these technical findings calls for the quieter courage of prevention. It calls for board members willing to raise assessments when repairs are needed. It calls for engineers willing to speak plainly. It calls for public officials willing to enforce building safety requirements before tragedy forces reform.
Insurance recovery cannot bring back the 98 souls lost in Surfside. No lawsuit, settlement, report, or technical finding can do that. But insurance exists because society recognizes that catastrophe leaves people in need of immediate help and allows those accountable a method to help financially. The settlements made by executives of those insurers fulfilled the promise of insurance in this case. It has truly never been written about. But in this case, the insurance product worked for those purchasing it and worked for the greater societal good as well.
The NIST findings should be read with reverence for the dead and with urgency for the living. The purpose of studying a tragedy is not to assign sorrow. Sorrow already has its owners. The purpose is to learn so that the same mistakes are not repeated. We owe it to the victims and their families to read that warning carefully.
Thought For The Day
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—George Santayana
1 NIST Releases Technical Findings on What Caused the 2021 Partial Collapse of Champlain Towers South. NIST (June 22, 2026).