Nearly a billion dollars for the victims of the collapsed Surfside building

The judge found it hard to believe. Survivors and families of victims of the collapse of a Florida building, which killed 98 people in 2021, will receive at least $997 million in compensation according to a court-negotiated agreement, confirmed to AFP a civil party lawyers.

The twelve-story building partially collapsed in the middle of the night on June 24 in Surfside, north of Miami Beach. To the 997 million will be added “about 100 million more dollars that we will recover for the victims”, added the lawyer, Carlos Silva.

Only one survivor

With the exception of a teenager rescued during the first hours, the rescuers, who had worked hard for a month, had not been able to save any of the inhabitants present in this building during the disaster.

The reasons for the collapse of the building, called Champlain Towers South and which overlooked the Surfside waterfront, have not yet been established with certainty, but the first elements of the investigation had revealed that the structure of the building appeared in places to be degraded, with “structural damage” reported as early as 2018.