MIAMI — Body camera video from the first three Surfside officers on the scene of the Champlain Tower South condo collapse captured scenes of almost unthinkable chaos: thick clouds of dust, a landscape strewn with wreckage and cries of help from unseen, seemingly unreachable victims.
The town released the footage on Tuesday. The images are difficult to watch, reviving the shock and horror that faced the very first responders to the catastrophe early in the morning of June 24.
Officer Ariol Lage, whose body camera started filming about 1:24 a.m. — minutes after the collapse — scurried past a debris and down a walkway, dust floating overhead and bright lights in front of him, asking if anybody is there. He hears a voice.
“Where are you? Are you OK?” he asks.
A woman responds: “No.”
“Anybody down there injured?” asks the officer.
“Yes,” is the response. “An old lady.”
The videos, provided to the Miami Herald Tuesday afternoon, offer the first detailed glimpse into the confusion for police who got to the scene at 8777 Collins Ave., even before the dust had settled.
The east side of the Champlain Towers South condo pancaked at about 1:20a.m. on June 24, as most residents slept. Why the tower went down is still unknown. Police were able to identify 98 bodies in the month-long rescue and recovery effort.
Each of the three bodycam videos was about 18 minutes long and taken between 1:24 a.m. and 1:44 a.m.
In another video, Surfside Officer Kemuel Gambirazio, who just got out of his vehicle, asks for help from Bal Harbor and Miami Beach police as he makes his way toward the rubble. He initially believed the garage floor fell.
He meets up with someone and says, “What happened? Holy s---. Can we jump over the wall?”
“No,” someone replies. “This is what fell. It’s a hole here. We have to go the other way.”
As the officer made his way around the building he was confronted by a man who said he just came down from the 12th-floor penthouse.
“I was on my phone. I heard something, like, fall. Not a big deal,” the man said, clearly out of breath. “All of a sudden I hear, like it’s a f---ing jet like through my bathroom. Got up and said that a f---ing plane?” Then the man tells the officer, “That building was an L. The whole side came down.”
On a third video, Officer Craig Lovellete calls his supervisor while he’s making his way down a walkway, voices can be heard screaming in the background.
One person yells, “Help me.”
“Captain,” the officer says into his radio. “The Champlain Towers, the building collapsed. The Champlain Towers building collapsed. The back part of the building collapsed.”
Then, after he takes a breath, “We don’t know. It just, somebody heard a loud noise and it just came down. Fire rescue is on the way. This is huge. I mean humongous.”
As the officer walked away from the scene, got into his patrol car and rolled slowly down the street, a man banged on the vehicle. The officer told him not to hit the car. When the man asks the officer if he speaks Spanish. The officer says no, he’s sorry, he doesn’t.
“Esta lastimada mi mujer,” or my wife is injured, the man says as the officer drives off.
Shamoka Furman, a security guard who was working the overnight shift at the Champlain Towers when it fell, told police she escaped through the parking garage and helped residents to safety. She said she heard a series of loud bangs and called 911.
“I don’t even know how I made it out,” she said.
