Balboa said he spotted fingers popping out through the broken concrete and heard a boy's voice say, "Can somebody see me?" Balboa said he climbed over rubble to reach the boy, later identified as Handler. "He was just saying, 'Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.' I told him: 'We’re not gonna go anywhere. We’ll be here,'" Balboa said. Read more here.
The documents that Surfside town officials posted online Friday date to 2018, with engineers noting design flaws and failing waterproofing that warned of "exponential damage" about 990 days before much of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex collapsed.
The reports, from few pages to several hundred pages long, range from detailed plans to permits for concrete repair to a courtesy notice reminding residents to turn off exterior lights so baby turtles wouldn't be confused when they hatched and not make it to the safety of the ocean.
An inspection report from Oct. 8, 2018, found "abundant" cracking and spalling of the columns, beams and walls in the garage under the tower that fell to the ground. Spalling refers to the deterioration of concrete, sometime causing flaking and the exposure of reinforcing steel bars known as rebar.
"Abundant cracking and spalling of varying degrees were observed in the concrete columns, beams and walls" of the ground floor parking garage, according to a structural field survey report by Maryland-based Morabito Consultants.
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