New video shows water gushing into Surfside condo basement moments before collapse

The TikTok video was taken minutes before the building collapsed.

Search and Rescue personnel work as Miami Dade firefighters spray water at a partial collapse building in Surfside, Miami Beach, on June 24, 2021 (AFP via Getty Images)

A TikTok video, purportedly of the north side of the Champlain Towers South condo moments before it collapsed, appears to show water pouring out of a ceiling in the parking garage and huge chunks of concrete and rubble covering the floor.

The video by user Adriana Sarmiento was posted with the caption: “The basement was the first to collapse!!!”

Ms Sarmiento told ABC News that she was on vacation and swimming in a nearby hotel pool when she heard a noise and went to inspect what had happened. She said on TikTok’s comments section that she took the video at 1.18am on 24 June.

The building collapsed at 1.25 am, Ms Sarmiento said.

Other eyewitnesses also described the pool deck falling into the garage below in the same general area where the rubble can be seen in Ms Sarmiento’s video, the Miami Herald reported.

The Washington Post quoted Sara Nir, a resident of Champlain Towers South as saying that she was inside her ground-level apartment shortly before 1 am when she heard loud “knocking” noises, followed by a noise that sounded like a wall crashing down around 1.14 am.

She said she ran to the lobby to alert the security guard, then heard a loud boom and saw “that part of the surface-level parking area and part of the pool deck had collapsed into the underground parking garage.”

Ms Nir said she ran back to her apartment to get her two children and the three ran away from the building before it collapsed minutes later.

The Miami Herald reported that the part of the garage that features in Ms Sarmiento’s TikTok was initially identified in 2018 by an engineer, Frank Morabito, as having “major damage” to the concrete slab above. “The damage,” he wrote, “was caused by a design error that caused the waterproofing on the pool deck to fail, allowing water to seep into the concrete and corrode the internal rebar.”

Cassie Stratton, another resident of the building, called her husband to tell him that a crater had formed in the pool deck. Her husband, who wasn’t named, told the Miami Herald that soon the line went dead. Stratton is one of those missing in the rubble.

Meanwhile, Associated Press reported that as more bodies emerged on Wednesday from the rubble of the collapsed tower, “the dead this time included the first children, ages 4 and 10.” Miami-Dade mayor Daniella Levine Cava called this a loss that is “too great to bear.”

It was also reported that just two months before the building came down, the president of its board had written a letter to the residents saying that structural problems identified in the 2018 inspection had “gotten significantly worse” and that major repairs would cost at least $15.5 million.