Collapse: Disaster in Surfside · Treefort Media & Miami Herald

No Action Taken

May 18, 2022·39 min·3 clips

Frank Morabito's verdict on a cracked pool-deck planter, 15 days before the collapse: 'no action to be taken.'

1. Collapse: Disaster in Surfside presents exclusive Miami Herald investigative reporting on previously unreported structural warning signs at Champlain Tower South in the months before the building killed 98 residents on June 24, 2021. 2. The episode's main expert is Dr. Abhi Aghayere, a structural engineering professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia who has been working with the Miami Herald investigative team since the day of the collapse. 3. The episode's central question is why two clear warning signs — a cascading column and cracked planter — were inspected but produced no emergency response in the months and weeks before the building fell. 4. Scott Stewart, building manager of Champlain Towers South from 2019 until the collapse, gave an exclusive interview to Herald reporters Sarah Blaske and Nick Nehamas, which forms the spine of the episode. 5. On June 8, 2021 — 15 days before the collapse — Stewart noticed two large cracks in a concrete pool-deck planter during his daily property walk and called structural engineer Frank Morabito. 6. Morabito sent a junior engineer who spent approximately 10-15 minutes examining the planter, took photos, attributed the cracks to plant roots, and never went downstairs to inspect the garage slab that supported the planter. 7. Morabito's conclusion, relayed by Stewart, was that 'it wasn't anything that urgent' since the planters were going to be replaced during renovations anyway — 'no action to be taken.' 8. Herald reporter Sarah Blaske describes the cracks as running roughly 20 feet horizontally and as wide as a finger could be stuck into, with one wall sitting about an inch lower than the other — suggesting the planter had begun to slump into the garage below. 9. Dr. Aghayere said the junior engineer should have gone downstairs and, if he did not know to do so, his senior colleague Frank Morabito should have instructed him — calling the failure to do so 'putting us on the edge of not paying attention to a structure crying out for help.' 10. A second set of photos from November 2020 — more than seven months before the collapse — shows Column 76, a 12-by-16 concrete pillar in the garage, with water streaming down it so heavily that an engineer called it a 'waterfall.' 11. Blaske explains that a waterfall down a column indicates a crack in the pool deck slab above large enough to channel that volume of water, putting the column at risk of punching shear failure — described as 'super dangerous, super fast' and capable of causing the type of collapse seen at Surfside. 12. Dr. Aghayere says the rust-colored stains around Column 76's base indicate corroding rebar inside the concrete, and compares the resulting slab to 'dry biscuits' that would simply crack apart with nothing to resist it. 13. Stewart confirms that Morabito's team photographed Column 76 in November 2020 to include in a bid for the concrete restoration project planned to begin the following year, but that if they had concerns about its structural integrity, they never told him. 14. Dr. Aghayere says that upon seeing the column photos, he would have ordered emergency shoring — rows of metal braces installed in the garage to prop up the deck slab — and would have evacuated the building. 15. Stewart confirmed Morabito never discussed emergency shoring with him, and that if shoring had been required, Stewart would have been informed. 16. The original building drawings included beams to support the pool deck planters from below, but those beams were left out of the final construction drawings, for reasons the episode says may never be known, making the planter area especially structurally weak. 17. Dr. Aghayere uses a recurring medical analogy throughout the episode: a patient whose doctor keeps treating symptoms without investigating the underlying cause — saying 'the building was crying out for help.' 18. Host Paul Bieben, a journalist and co-writer of the series, delivers the reporting in a deliberate, evidence-by-evidence style with extended verbatim audio from the Stewart interview and from Dr. Aghayere's Zoom call. 19. People with an interest in forensic structural engineering, investigative journalism, or the Surfside disaster will find this episode technically detailed and primary-source rich. 20. Listeners seeking emotional survivor stories or courtroom proceedings will find this episode focused almost entirely on engineering evidence and structural analysis.

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A careful, devastating account of warning signs that should not have been missed.

The episode treats a structural failure as a slow, uneasy accounting of missed signs. Dr. Abhi Aghayere walks through the design issues, the maintenance lapses, and the photos that should have set off alarms long before the collapse.

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Listen for the engineering questions behind a preventable catastrophe.

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