SURFSIDE, Fla.
On the ninth floor, Magaly Delgado, 80, a devout Catholic from Cuba with a love for lobster and Elvis Presley, was looking forward to traveling to Napa, Calif.
Seven floors below, Chaim “Harry” Rosenberg, a 52-year-old asset manager from Brooklyn who is Jewish, was thrilled to host his daughter, Malki, and her husband, Benny, from New Jersey. He had bought the apartment just a few months ago, and hoped the sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean would help clear his mind after losing his wife to brain cancer and both parents to COVID-19.
Leidy Vanessa Luna Villalba, 23, a nanny from rural Paraguay, had arrived on Wednesday with the sister of Paraguay’s first lady. It was her first trip abroad and she messaged her family on WhatsApp that she could not wait to explore the city and go to the beach.
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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.
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