NIGHT TERROR

In the middle of the night, as most of the tenants slept, much of a 12-story Florida condominium collapsed, killing scores and sending survivors fleeing for their lives. But amid the rubble and dust, eroes appeared as neighbor reached out to neighbor.

-  Kelli Kennedy

Alfredo Lopez and his wife, Marian, were asleep when the first thundering blast jolted them awake at 1:14 a.m. on Thursday, June 24. Moments later, a second boom, much louder than the first, shook the bed on the sixth floor of their Surfside, Florida, apartment.

Alfredo rushed to wake his 24-year old son, Michael, urging him to get dressed, before running to the balcony window. “All I could see was just white dust, very thick. I could barely see the balcony railing,” he says.

The lights cut out and the emergency alarm came on, warning the residents of the Champlain Towers South to evacuate. Alfredo thought about putting on sneakers, but his hands were shaking so badly he knew he couldn’t tie the laces. So he settled on sandals with straps.

Marian was disoriented. The 67-year-old fumbled for shoes as her husband pressed her impatiently. She put on a handy pair of slippers instead.

The Lopez family had lived for two decades on the street side of the condo building. Alfredo used to joke to his wife that she’d have to bury him there. That prediction almost came to pass. When he opened the front door to the hallway that night, half the building was gone. A jagged five-foot chunk of flooring barely left enough room to escape.

“There was no hallway, no ceiling, no apartments, no walls—nothing,” he says. In fact, he was staring at the moonlit ocean. Roughly half of the apartments in the 12-story, 136-unit complex had collapsed, pancaking one residence on top of another.

Anyone looking at the building from the vantage point of the beach would see entire rooms exposed, as the Washington Post described it, “like stage sets before an audience—bunk beds here, a couch there, a washing machine hanging from a ledge, mattresses stacked against a wall.”