The town of Surfside, Florida, fell silent in the early hours of Wednesday to mark five years since the Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed, killing 98 people in one of the deadliest structural failures in American history. A torch was lit just after 1 a.m. — the hour the 12-story oceanfront tower came down on June 24, 2021 — in a ceremony organizers called a symbol of "hope, resilience and remembrance," with a second gathering planned for 10 a.m. at 88th Street and Collins Avenue.
Only three people were pulled alive from the rubble. The search for victims stretched for weeks as crews worked through the pancaked debris, and the disaster became a national reckoning over the safety of aging high-rise condominiums, many of them along Florida's salt-exposed coastline.
The cause is no longer a mystery. A years-long investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that the failure began weeks before the collapse, when connections between the pool-deck slab and the columns supporting it started to give way around early June 2021. Structural design that did not meet code, compounded by four decades of alterations and deterioration, left the deck unable to carry its load — and once it failed, the collapse propagated into the tower above in a slow-motion sequence.
For the families of the dead and the survivors, the anniversary is a wound that has not closed. "Yes, it's angering and it's hurtful, but to focus on the future, on things that we can do so that nothing like this ever happens again," said Devin Gonzalez, who was 16 when the building fell and lost her father that night.
The collapse reshaped Florida law. In its first legislative response, the state enacted requirements for mandatory "milestone" structural inspections of older condominium buildings and for reserve studies forcing associations to set aside money for major repairs — measures meant to ensure that warning signs like those at Champlain Towers can no longer be deferred indefinitely. The rules apply statewide and have since rippled through condo markets far beyond South Florida.
Those reforms have come at a cost that is now reverberating through the housing market. As associations confront long-postponed maintenance and rebuild depleted reserves, many owners have been hit with steep special assessments and sharply higher fees, and insurers have grown more cautious about underwriting older towers. The result is a wave of financial pressure on condo residents — an unintended consequence of finally accounting for deferred upkeep.
On the site itself, the lot where Champlain Towers South once stood is being redeveloped into a new luxury condominium, a decision that has divided survivors and victims' relatives. Five years on, there is still no permanent memorial honoring the 98 people who died, and the question of how the place should be remembered remains unresolved.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who helped lead the response in 2021, said the passage of time has not dulled the loss. "The pain is still very real," she said. For a community that watched its neighbors disappear in seconds, the fifth anniversary is less a milestone than a renewed vow that the lessons paid for in lives will not be forgotten.