President Biden to visit Florida condo collapse site on Thursday

Biden plans to visit site of Florida condo collapse

President Biden said Tuesday he hopes to visit the site of the Florida condo collapse that killed over 11 people.

SURFSIDE, Fla. - President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will visit Surfside, Florida following the deadly condo collapse that killed over a dozen people.

The Biden's will visit the site on Thursday, July 1. The president is expected to meet with the family of the victims as the death toll rises to 18.

Two of the deaths reported on Wednesday afternoon were children. There are nearly 150 people unaccounted for.

In the meantime, rescuers are getting assistance from international teams out of Mexico and Israel as well as help from responders from Central Florida.

While numerous theories have emerged, no definitive cause has been identified in Thursday’s collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building.

Despite an engineer’s warning of major structural problems, a town building official told board members their Florida high-rise condominium was in "very good shape" almost three years before it collapsed, according to minutes of that meeting released Monday.

The Surfside official, Rosendo "Ross" Prieto was quoted as making those comments at a meeting of the Champlain Towers South board on Nov. 15, 2018. That was just over a month after engineering firm Morabito Consultants issued a report describing key flaws in the structure.

The discussion with Prieto came as Champlain Towers was beginning to explore what work was needed under city and county ordinances for the building to meet a 40-year recertification that was to arrive in 2021.

(Photos courtesy: Leo Soto)

The board meeting minutes say that Prieto told them in 2018 the Morabito engineering report had collected the necessary information and "it appears the building is in very good shape."

A day later, Prieto told the then-town manager of Surfside he thought the meeting was a success and credited Champlain Towers with getting a good early start on the recertification process.

"The response was very positive from everyone in the room," Prieto wrote in the email, also released by town officials. "All the main concerns over their forty-year recertification process were addressed."

Yet there is no evidence any of the critical concrete structure work ever started, the documents show. Owners of the 136 units had been told earlier this year they would have to pay their share of a $15 million assessment — $9.1 million of which was major work — by July 1. That assessment ranged from about $80,000 for a one-bedroom unit to more than $330,000 for a penthouse.

Prieto no longer works at Surfside and efforts to locate him Monday for comment were not immediately successful. Prieto previously told the Miami Herald he didn’t remember getting the Morabito report and declined to comment on the November 2018 board meeting.

The minutes were forwarded to Surfside officials on Sunday by an attorney for the board, according to the town.

The Morabito report focused attention on the pool deck, which was found to have waterproofing underneath that had failed and had been laid flat instead of sloping to drain off water. This threatened not only the concrete slab under the pool but also other structural areas.

"Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially," said the report, which also cited "abundant cracking" in concrete columns and beams.