THE ESCAPE

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, HALF OF MIAMI’S 13-STOREY CHAMPLAIN TOWERS CONDO COLLAPSED. THROUGH CHAOS AND CARNAGE, THE SURVIVORS FOUND THEIR WAY TO SAFETY.

- Kelli Kennedy

Sixty-one-year-old Alfredo Lopez and his 67-year-old 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. He could only see thick, white dust.

The lights cut out and the emergency alarm came on, warning the residents of the Champlain Towers South to evacuate. Alfredo thought about 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. She 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 right at the moonlit ocean. Roughly half of the apartments in the 13-storey, 136unit 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.

Alfredo stood in his apartment's threshold frozen in terror, unable to move. “I was petrified. I really thought, This is it. We are going to die.”