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“You just want to jump on the rubble,” a relative of Maggie Vasquez-Bello, one of the missing, said as she sat on the golden sand below the collapsed tower, clutching a rosary. The relative asked not to be identified.
While the cause of the collapse has yet to be determined, Surfside officials released a 2018 report late Friday night in which an engineer flagged that the building had a “major error” where lack of drainage on the pool deck had caused “major structural damage” to a concrete slab below that deck.
According to engineering and architectural experts, multiple factors could have played a role in the tragedy: saltwater corroding the concrete and weakening support beams; a compromised foundation; or flaws in the building’s design or construction.