Collapse: Disaster in Surfside · Treefort Media & Miami Herald

No Warning

March 9, 2022·40 min·3 clips

The first police officer on scene at the Champlain Tower collapse arrived at 1:25 a.m. to a massive hole filled with cars, rubble, and people calling for help in the dark.

The night begins with a listener note, then moves into June 24, 2021, as 911 lines in Surfside light up and officers head for Champlain Towers South. Dust hangs in the dark. One officer walks up a driveway littered with wreckage while radio traffic tries to name what nobody can quite understand yet. His flashlight drops, and below him is a huge hole filled with cars, rubble, and people. Voices call from inside the broken structure. The scene keeps getting worse by the minute. More officers arrive. Emergency crews pull up. Nobody knows how many people are still in the standing section or under the pile. Witnesses can only watch. Samantha Gross, a Herald reporter who lives nearby, gets close enough to see the torn-open backside of the building. Her account shifts the view from concrete and steel to kitchen appliances, bed frames, mattresses, clothing, picture frames, and the ordinary stuff of home. It was a living building, and the episode lets that land without dressing it up. Families, vacationers, retirees, children, grandchildren, whole rooms opened to the street. Police try to hold the chaos in place. On Collins Avenue, a man who says he is a firefighter runs toward officers after leaving the standing section. He says he was on penthouse 12, in the room with his family, watching YouTube on his phone, when he heard something fall. At first it sounded small. Then it became one more piece of a disaster that gave responders no warning, only voices, sections, and body camera fragments to follow.

As heard by us

A disaster account that stays close to the scene and the people inside it.

Collapse: Disaster in Surfside starts on the night of June 24, 2021, when 911 lines lit up in Surfside, Florida and police rushed to Champlain Towers South as confusion took over.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the first frantic minutes after Surfside's collapse, before the scale is clear.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Collapse: Disaster in Surfside