MIAMI — A Cuban-born engineer who grew up in Miami will lead the federal team tasked with determining why Champlain Towers South partially collapsed on June 24, killing 98 people.
Judith Mitrani-Reiser, who works for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida, announced the members of the team Wednesday — and said the mission feels personal. Her parents fled Cuba with her and her sister and arrived in Miami in 1980, when Mitrani-Reiser was 2 years old.
“I grew up in Miami and the Champlain Towers South collapse site is a short walk from my late grandmother’s apartment in Biscayne Point,” she said at a virtual news conference Wednesday. “Please know I am deeply committed to finding out why this building collapsed.”
The federal agency, which has conducted just four previous investigations into building failures since being given the authority to do so in 2002, named 14 experts to lead the Surfside probe, half of whom are NIST employees. Over time, Mitrani-Reiser said, more experts will be brought in.
Among them are Glenn Bell, who conducted analysis for NIST’s investigation of the World Trade Center towers collapse; Ken Hover, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University; and Jack Moehle, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The goal, Mitrani-Reiser said, is to determine why the building failed and to make recommendations on construction standards and practices “so that a tragedy like this never happens again.”
To get there, the agency has divided its investigative team into five sections: building and code history, evidence preservation, materials science, geotechnical engineering and structural engineering.
“We want to know everything we can about Champlain Towers South from the time it was designed to the moment of its collapse,” Mitrani-Reiser said.
NIST is now in its “final days” of evidence collection from the collapse site, Mitraini-Reiser said. In an Aug. 11 update, the agency said it has begun “studying the geologic characteristics underneath the collapsed building site, as well as the properties of the building’s foundation system.”
But the agency won’t reveal anything yet about what, if anything, it has learned.
“Because it’s an open investigation, we will not be able to release any details of our investigation to date,” Mitrani-Reiser said.
Those details should start to come out in the next few months, as the team — known as the National Construction Safety Team — presents updates on its findings to an advisory committee.
Mitraini-Reiser said that, if investigators find any information to suggest anyone is at risk, they would have an obligation to inform the public. That includes residents at Champlain Towers North, the sister building of the south tower that was designed around the same time and by the same people.
But she said her team is focused on why Champlain South collapsed, and isn’t specifically studying Champlain North.
“The safety evaluation of that [north] tower is not part of our investigative work,” she said.
The investigation likely won’t be finalized for years. Past NIST investigations have taken between 2 1/2 years and six years.
Mitrani-Reiser also addressed questions Wednesday about restricted access to the collapse site for an engineer hired by the town of Surfside, Allyn Kilsheimer. She said those decisions are up to the Miami-Dade Police Department, which is leading a criminal investigation into the collapse.
“It’s not our place to dictate what Miami-Dade police does with their incident and the site of their investigation,” Mitrani-Reiser said.
The cause of the collapse is still unknown. Shortly after 1 a.m. on June 24, about half of the L-shaped South Tower pancaked into the ground, minutes after parts of the lobby-level pool deck had slammed into a parking garage below.
A Miami Herald investigation found that the building was poorly designed, even for the 1970s when the plans were originally drawn and codes were less rigorous. Most of the column designs were too narrow to safely accommodate the amount of reinforcing steel called for in the plans at the basement and ground floors, especially at critical areas where the columns connected to the slab, the Herald found.
An engineer hired by the condo board to evaluate the building in 2018 found “major structural damage,” some caused by a lack of proper drainage on the pool deck.
James Olthoff, the director of NIST, said the agency will investigate the Champlain Towers collapse with an eye toward making buildings safer nationwide.
“I’m confident this team will work tirelessly to understand what happened in Surfside,” he said in a statement, “and to make recommendations that will improve the safety of buildings across the United States to ensure a tragedy like this does not happen again.”
