The federal investigation into the deadly collapse of a Florida beachfront condominium building last year is entering a new phase that involves cutting and drilling into concrete and steel to determine what role they played in the disaster, officials said Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology said in a news release that what is known as invasive testing will begin soon as investigators seek samples from materials collected at the collapsed Champlain Towers South site.
“This is an important step in the investigation, one we are able to take only after months of careful investigation and preparation,” said Glenn Bell, co-leader of the investigation.
The tests will help investigators find potential flaws in structural elements of the 12-story building by looking into things such as density of the materials, how porous they were and if there was corrosion, NIST said.
Champlain Towers was in the midst of its 40-year structural review when it collapsed without warning in the early morning hours of June 24, 2021, killing 98 people. The incident is one of the deadliest accidental building collapses in US history.
Federal investigators have not formally concluded what caused the building to fall apart but the towers, which were built in 1981, had faced years of scrutiny over its deteriorating condition.
A lawsuit filed this past November says that construction of a luxury building next door triggered the collapse of the building.
Legal settlements of more than $1 billion have been reached for families of victims and owners of the 136 units, with a key court hearing on approval set next Thursday in Miami.
The concrete, steel and other material from the collapse has been stored in a warehouse in Miami-Dade County, where it has been catalogued and used to create a 3-D model of the building, NIST said in Wednesday’s announcement. The materials will be moved out of the warehouse to an undisclosed location for the next phase of tests.
NIST also said investigators have developed a questionnaire for interviews of anyone who may have information about the collapse. This will be used in development of “failure hypotheses” the agency intends to analyze for possible causes.
Anyone with potentially relevant information, including photos and videos, can submit them through a NIST site. The agency has said it could take years to complete its investigation into the collapse.