MIAMI — Ever since the morning of June 24, 2021, when Champlain Towers South pancaked to the ground, surviving residents have claimed that damage caused by the driving of sheet piles into the ground at the construction site immediately to the south contributed to the degradation and eventual collapse of their building. The work had occurred five years earlier, but residents remembered it vividly as disrupting their lives.
This week, the developers behind the 18-story Eighty Seven Park tower will seek to defend themselves against those claims by performing testing on the northern property line bordering the Champlain South site, where 98 people died.
The condo association for the luxury tower initially balked at the request by developers, citing concerns over the duration of the testing (two weeks), and other issues. But attorneys for the condo developer and the owners’ board worked out a deal over the weekend before it escalated into a court fight.
They told Judge Michael Hanzman on Monday morning that Geosyntec, the developers’ testing contractor, will start the post-collapse assessment on Tuesday. Attorneys for the developers of the condo tower are looking to gauge the depth and integrity of Champlain Towers’ own sheet piles — metal driven into the ground to serve as an underground retaining wall — which they say would have buffered the building from both construction vibrations and water intrusion from the Eighty Seven Park site.
“Geosyntec will be allowed access to the beach access today for mobilization, and testing can commence tomorrow,” said Greenberg Traurig attorney Michael Thomas, who is representing the developers.
Concerns over the Eighty Seven Park construction vibrations erupted after a report disclosed in November showed that the jolts from sheet-pile driving at the luxury tower exceeded the developers’ own target limits. Allegations that the jostling of the vintage Champlain South building contributed to its fate became one of the contentions at the heart of a sprawling, complex lawsuit doling out responsibility for the historic Surfside tragedy.
The report, commissioned by developers, was based on March 2016 readings from two seismographs positioned on the ground near Champlain Towers’ southernmost perimeter wall. Newly filed court documents show that work on the condo development was temporarily halted one morning after the seismologist for Eighty Seven Park’s developer worried that vibration levels from sheet-pile driving were “too high” and could damage the neighboring structure.
But work resumed within half an hour at the instruction of site superintendent Frank Wiza, who allowed crews to resume using heavy equipment to drive the long sheets of steel deep into the earth less than 15 feet south of Champlain South’s underground structural perimeter wall.
The developers have adamantly denied that construction of Eighty Seven Park had anything to do with Champlain South’s later collapse. Wiza could not be reached for comment.
------
(Miami Herald investigative reporters Sarah Blaskey and Nicholas Nehamas contributed to this report.)
------
