Settlement Announcement, Surfside Condo Collapse

Started by AugustinD • 11 replies • 559 views

💬 Join us to post & get advice from 50,000 HOA & Condo leaders.

⚡ Takes 30 seconds

Already a member? Log in

AugustinD
Posts: 3,698

Posted:

From the New York Times this evening, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/us/surfside-condo-collapse-settlement-victims.html :

Families of the 98 victims will receive at least $997 million, less attorney fees.

The settlement for the victims’ families made public on Wednesday (May 11, 2022) came about after the developers of the adjacent luxury building, Eighty Seven Park, and a slew of contractors and consultants who had been sued or investigated by the victims’ lawyers signed on. The plaintiffs had argued that construction work at Eighty Seven Park damaged Champlain Towers South — an accusation that Eighty Seven Park’s developers and contractors denied.

Among the companies that agreed to settle are the engineers who had inspected and begun to conduct work to address serious structural flaws in Champlain Towers South before the collapse.

A couple of months ago, a settlement in the amount of $83 million was reached to compensate owners (or owners' estates) for their property losses.

The funds for the $83 million for the unit owners will come from Champlain Towers South’s insurers and the sale of the land where the building stood at 8777 Collins Ave. The nearly two acres of beachfront property are expected to sell soon, after an auction, for at least $120 million.

The building held 136 condo units.

Excerpts:
The differing compensation for victims’ families, who lost loved ones, and survivors, who lost condo units, led to significant friction between the groups and to raw, emotional court testimony at a hearing in March that pitted the two sides against each other.

“We know we did not cause that collapse,” Oren Cytrynbaum, a unit owner, said then. “A billion dollars, if I were on the other side, would not bring those loved ones back.”
...

As part of their earlier settlement, the condo owners were released from any liability for negligence in the building’s maintenance. Under Florida law, they could have been sued for up to the value of their units.

At first, any settlement seemed unlikely. Some victims’ families argued all the money recovered through the lawsuit should go to them, and none to the unit owners. Judge Hanzman disagreed, saying unit owners had to rebuild their lives from scratch after their steep economic losses. The part of the building that did not collapse was demolished in the days after the tragedy, with unit owners never able to return.

Judge Hanzman approved that $83 million settlement in March, with no guarantee that more money would follow for the victims’ families — and the possibility of a long, dragged-out trial that could last years, as many class-action cases do.

JohnT38 (South Carolina)
Posts: 1,631

Posted:

"As part of their earlier settlement, the condo owners were released from any liability for negligence in the building’s maintenance. Under Florida law, they could have been sued for up to the value of their units."

In other words no lessons were learned from an HOA perspective. Business as usual...

SheliaH (Indiana)
Posts: 6,964

Posted:

Watch for the fireworks in the statehouse as insurers, engineering firms, developers and other folks demand that the legislature fix the law to prevent such settlements in the future.

One can only hope something changes regarding the law concerning reserves - if memory serves, the state changed the law mandating reserves to making it optional. That's what a lot of HOAs did and along came assorted hurricanes (Michael, Andrew and some others I can't remember). Unfortunately, it appears as if Florida's lawmakers are a nest of Florida men and women, and not in a good way.....

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it. Marcus Aurelius

SteveH35 (Washington)
Posts: 339

Posted:

Personally, I'm the biggest fan of the Miami Herald's coverage of the Champlain tragedy: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article261342832.html

Lest we not forget that the Florida legislature failed to pass any new measures to keep things in check this past session. Insurance premiums in Florida are off the chain: https://account.miamiherald.com/paywall/stop?resume=260698292

SheliaH (Indiana)
Posts: 6,964

Posted:

Yes, they're too busy fighting Disney....

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it. Marcus Aurelius

AugustinD
Posts: 3,698

Posted:

From SteveH35's miamiherald citation, some details that I think are interesting:

Plaintiffs settled with at least 10 entities, including the insurers of the security company for Champlain South, the developers of the condominium next door, engineers, architects, a law firm and the Champlain South condo association.

They include 8701 Collins Development, Terra Group, Terra World Investments, John Moriarty and Associates of Florida, NV5, DeSimone Consulting Engineers, Stantec Architecture, Morabito Consultants, the law firm Becker, and Champlain Towers South Condominium Association. The Herald has learned an approximate breakdown of the $997 million total. Various parties associated with the Eighty Seven Park condo adjacent to Champlain South settled for about $400 million. Parties associated with the Champlain South condo association account for about $100 million. The town of Surfside is settling for a sum in the low, single-digit millions. Securitas, the security company responsible for safety systems at Champlain South that included smoke alarms and intercoms, settled for the largest amount, in the neighborhood of $450 million to $500 million. The last major defendants to settle were 8701 Collins Development and Terra Group, the developers, and John Moriarty and Associates, the general contractor of the neighboring ultra-luxury, Renzo Piano-designed Eighty Seven Park condo, located just south of the Surfside municipal border with Miami Beach. They were accused in the litigation of destabilizing Champlain South during Eighty Seven Park’s construction in 2016 when metal sheet piles were driven into the ground about 12 feet from the Surfside condo’s perimeter wall around the pool deck.

They will pay an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs without admitting any negligence. Champlain South residents claimed vibrations from sheet-pile driving rattled their building — knocking pictures off their walls and nearly throwing one resident off a treadmill. Five years later, the pool deck at Champlain South broke away from the structural wall near where the pile-driving occurred. Seven minutes after the deck caved in, half of the 12-story tower collapsed. However, the majority of the wall connection did not fail, including in areas where measured vibrations were highest. Experts consulted by the Herald said vibrations five years earlier could not have triggered the collapse nor were they strong enough to damage a healthy structure. But Champlain South was under-designed and poorly maintained. The Eighty Seven Park firms deny their work had anything to do with the collapse in 2021. They said the vibrations, which were measured and monitored, were too low to have caused “structural damage to any portion of Champlain Towers South.” “Our clients’ insurers made a business decision to contribute to the overall settlement of this litigation in order to resolve claims against them and avoid the time, expense, and inconvenience of litigation,” said Michael Thomas, attorney for 8701 Collins Development. “Our clients’ participation in any eventual settlement is neither an admission of liability nor recognition of the validity of any of the plaintiffs’ claims. The design, development, and construction of Eighty Seven Park in no way caused or contributed to the collapse of Champlain Towers South. Hopefully, ending this litigation will help bring some closure to the survivors of this tragic event.”

...
Three of the major defendants previously agreed to payments totaling $55.55 million, all covered by their insurance carriers. The law firm Becker, which represented Champlain South’s condo association, will pay $31 million. Morabito Consultants, hired to inspect Champlain South for the recertification, will pay $16 million. And DeSimone, structural engineer for Eighty Seven Park, will pay $8.55 million. The condo association’s insurance paid out $50 million. The resale value of the Champlain South property was not included in the total. The 1.8-acre parcel at 8777 Collins Ave. will be auctioned on May 24. Already the opening bid is $120 million. That will increase the settlement to close to $1.1 billion.

================

Aug comment:

I think this large a settlement this soon seems almost too good to be true. It seems the negotiators had to have been brilliant.

AugustinD
Posts: 3,698

Posted:

Quote:

Posted By AugustinD on 05/12/2022 7:36 AM
The law firm Becker, which represented Champlain South’s condo association, will pay $31 million.

I was wondering what was up with the plaintiffs' (or plaintiffs' attorneys; same difference colloquially) suing Surfside condo's law firm. Some background I found:

Becker & Poliakoff Law Firm: The ‘Nemesis’ of Condo Safety Reformers
Sep 28, 2021
[excerpts]
Becker [& Poliakoff] attorneys have represented the Champlain Towers South Condominium, on and off, for over 30 years, including two instances when the condo underwent significant renovations.

For decades, the law firm representing the collapsed Champlain Towers South has waged a successful lobbying campaign against condominium safety measures.

Becker & Poliakoff,” said former state Rep. Julio Robaina, R-Miami, who focused on condo legal reforms when he served in the Legislature. “That was my nemesis.”

The firm is a force in Tallahassee politics and in city halls and condo towers across the state. Its founders are credited with writing much of the law that underpins condo living in Florida, and its principals have spent decades constructing a hands-off regulatory framework that empowers associations to steer their own fate.

The firm has marshalled its condo clientele to deliver torrents of “grassroots” attacks on legislation that could have made condos safer.

As elected officials across the state debate potentially costly new regulations to make condos safer, Becker is sure to exert influence. The firm says it represents more than 4,000 condo buildings in Florida. It has lobbying agreements with city and county governments throughout the state. One of its attorneys, Joseph Adams, sits on the Florida Bar’s Real Property, Probate and Trust Law task force advising the governor and Legislature on what should be done to prevent another condo collapse.

“They’re the ocean liner among [homeowner association] and condo attorneys. They’re not the little tugboat,” said attorney Fred O’Neal, an attorney in Windermere in central Florida who represents homeowners against associations. “In Tallahassee, the Legislature obviously bends to the will of the best organized, loudest voices.”

Becker attorney Ken Direktor currently serves as the Champlain’s attorney. When it collapsed, the building’s registered agent in state records was a Becker attorney, Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Gongora.

Becker representatives, including Gongora, Rubin, and chief condo lobbyist Donna DiMaggio Berger, declined to be interviewed for this article.

According to records released by the town of Surfside, Becker attorneys have represented the Champlain Towers South Condominium, on and off, for over 30 years, including two instances when the condo underwent significant renovations.

The Becker firm has helped Florida’s significant condo population avoid mandates from Tallahassee, including some of the very reforms under discussion now.

With political savvy and a legion of clients, the firm can orchestrate a deluge of condo emails, calls and letters to legislators — and occasionally a swarm of condo dwellers spilling out of a chartered plane or bus in Tallahassee in matching T-shirts.

Prompted by the firm, retirees have asked legislators for mercy from new laws that might increase condo fees, like a requirement to add fire sprinklers. Former legislators said condo residents didn’t necessarily know what the legislation was about — just that it might cost them something.

“Their philosophy has been more of a ‘no mandates; allow these associations to make their own decisions,’ " said Travis Moore, a former Becker lobbyist and now head of the Community Associations Institute, an association-industry lobbying group. “And in some regards, that has fit in really nicely with an administration and a Legislature that feels that way about virtually everything.”

When the Champlain fell, it needed millions of dollars of work, but hadn’t saved up the money. That’s because Florida condos today can leave reserve funds empty with a majority vote of owners present at a meeting. Fort Lauderdale’s Jim Scott, a Republican senator, pushed the bill that reduced the vote needed from two-thirds to a majority in 1980, archived state records show.

Subsequent legislative efforts to make it harder for condos to waive reserve requirements, or to require more money to be saved in reserve accounts, failed.

As dust from the rubble of Surfside still hung in the air, Becker’s chief condo lobbyist, Donna DiMaggio Berger, appeared on national TV, suggesting condos like the Champlain should have built up stronger reserves.

“In far too many communities,” she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “we do have members voting to waive reserves each year.”

Yet the Becker lobbying arm founded by Berger — the Community Association Leadership Lobby (CALL) — fought reforms aimed at making reserve funding mandatory, former state Sen. Steve Geller said.

“Becker & Poliakoff opposed it. They organized their condos against it,” said Geller, now Broward County mayor. “Probably because that’s what their condos wanted them to do. … They were not the only one, but Becker was the biggest.”

When the Legislature thought it was a good idea for condos to install fire sprinklers, Becker sought to neuter the law. It passed 21 years ago, but thanks in part to Becker, the law still doesn’t apply to older condos like the ones lining South Florida’s coast.

Becker unleashed a torrent of opposition.

“A prominent law firm located in Broward that does a lot of condominium work, they organized a bus of condo leaders and sent tens of thousands of letters to the Legislature saying, ‘Don’t do it, it’s too expensive to retrofit,’” Geller said in a recent condo safety hearing. “So we moved it back three or four years — until the towering inferno occurs.”
...
Led by Berger, the Becker condo lobby also stepped into battle against a bill that would have required, among other things, structural inspections for condos every five years.

The bill, proposed by then-Sen. Rene Garcia, now a Miami-Dade County commissioner, contained a litany of things the firm opposed, including term limits for condo board members, and a law making it illegal for condo boards to “abuse” unit owners.

Berger told the Sun Sentinel at the time, in 2006, that the bill was so “provocative” it would only anger people.

The bill said: “Every 5 years the board of administration shall have the condominium buildings inspected by a professional engineer or professional architect registered in the state for the purpose of determining that the building is structurally and electrically safe.” It failed.

Former Rep. Robaina wrung his hands in late June, when the Champlain collapsed in Surfside, wondering if his failed proposals would have saved 98 lives.

He told the Sun Sentinel that Becker’s firm stymied his efforts to pass a bill requiring coastal condo safety certifications every 10 years. Currently Broward and Miami-Dade counties require inspections 40 years after construction, and every 10 years thereafter.

“That bill never even moved, there was no support from the House, and it wasn’t just Becker & Poliakoff, but other law firms, saying there was an undue burden financially on the associations,” Robaina said.

Pete Dunbar, an influential longtime lobbyist for the Florida Bar and an adjunct professor at Florida State University College of Law, said the Becker firm is by no means alone in advancing condo issues, but is a respected member of the condo “gaggle’' in the state Capitol.

“My experience is they have always been a respected voice in this dialogue. I don’t know that anybody is overriding in their influence,” he said. “It takes reaching consensus among those respected voices.”

When Robaina in 2008 proposed that condos be inspected every five years so that reserve funds could be properly estimated, Becker took credit for nullifying the law.

Becker’s main condo lobbyist at the time, Yeline Goin, got the bill amended so that condos could opt out, the Sun Sentinel reported at the time.

The entire requirement was repealed two years later.

“That was done by the law firm of Becker & Poliakoff, I’m sure, because they were the ones that lobbied against everything I ever did,” Robaina told the Sun Sentinel recently.

Robaina suspects the firm will be active in the legislative scramble triggered by the Surfside collapse.

The firm repeatedly declined to respond to questions asking about its work to defeat legislation, its position on pending reforms, and its battles against individual condo owners.

“To say our community association practice is against safety is a gross misrepresentation,” the firm’s chief marketing officer, Doreen Fiorelli, said in an email.

Condo associations were riding roughshod over unit owners until a Florida condo ombudsman office was created. The first ombudsman appointed said Donna Berger played a role in his firing.

First, she had issues with the creation of the nation’s only condo ombudsman.

The audio recording of a 2004 committee meeting captures Berger telling legislators the bill should be rewritten so that condo boards could use the ombudsman to pursue unit owners — the reverse of its purpose.

“I’d like to see it be a two-way street,” she said. “I’d like it to be a forum where boards can go also if they’re having a problem with a particular unit owner.”

Florida’s first condo ombudsman, Dr. Virgil Rizzo, supported many of the provisions that were anathema to Becker: term limits on condo board members, mandatory safety inspections of condo buildings, mandatory education for board members, and a law to make it illegal for board members to abuse condo owners, a 2006 Sun Sentinel story recounted. Becker “strongly opposed” his appointment, the Sun Sentinel reported, and CALL was “a constant critic of the ombudsman.”

“They are fighting every year against anything that could be considered owner-friendly or help owners to really see what’s going on,” said Jan Bergemann, founder of the owner-friendly advocacy group Cyber Citizens For Justice.

Rizzo’s office was empowered to monitor problematic condo elections — another reason it was at odds with the Becker firm, said Val Lucier, the state’s first monitor.

“Most elections, we’d run into a law firm that didn’t do right by the membership but tried to do right by the board,” Lucier said. “A large percentage were Becker & Poliakoff’s attorneys. I don’t want to disparage one law firm over another, but it was the fact.”

Berger also accused Rizzo of “overstepping” his authority as an ombudsman, Bergemann said. Rizzo constantly clashed with state officials, insisting his office was independent.

When Berger requested records of the ombudsman’s election monitoring, Rizzo was accused of not responding to it. Berger filed suit.

Rizzo said he soon got a call with this message from then-Gov. Jeb Bush’s office: “‘You got a problem. You’re in court.”

Rizzo went on a cruise and when he came back, a note taped on his condo door said he’d been fired.
The firm’s founders, Alan Becker and Gary Poliakoff, weren’t just good at playing the game of condo law — they wrote the rules.

Becker served in the state Legislature from 1972 to 1978. The following year, he and his University of Miami law school buddy founded their firm and got to work rewriting Florida’s condo act.

In Tallahassee, Becker was the maestro of rewrites. Poliakoff gave him real-world intelligence from Miami.

“They invented the field,” said Keith Poliakoff, son of Gary Poliakoff and an attorney who worked at the firm until 2013. Gary Poliakoff died in 2014, Becker in 2020.

Now the firm’s lawyers loom large in Florida’s lobbying industry with a reach that covers every level of government, from tiny municipalities to Congress.

Since 2017, Becker lobbyists appeared at least 560 times in the Florida House of Representatives alone, the Sun Sentinel found. Between the state and federal levels, their clients include Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, the Broward Sheriff’s Office, and 21 cities, towns and villages in Florida, including Miami, Hollywood, and Pompano Beach.

“They became like the grandfather of community association law all over the planet,” said Moore, of the Community Associations Institute. “Every law firm that works in that field, there’s someone you can trace back to [Becker].”

Commissioner-lobbyist Gongora
The experience of Gongora, the agent of record for the Champlain when the towers collapsed, highlights the dense web of connections between the firm and officialdom.

Gongora is a Miami Beach elected official and has been at the center of at least 12 complaints, investigations and inquiries lodged with the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission, often dealing with his and Becker’s ability to sway city politics through lobbying and representing clients. The ethics commission only made two adverse findings against Gongora: that he failed to file his financial disclosures on time in 2018, and that he leveraged his office to secure tickets to the 80s rock band New Order last year.

Gongora did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Sun Sentinel identified at least 10 condominium buildings connected to Becker that have appeared in front of the Miami Beach special master — who rules on building code violations — during Gongora’s tenure as a city commissioner. During that time, Gongora made moves suggesting that he wanted to replace the chief special master.

In 2010, the Miami-Dade ethics commission spoke with then-Miami Beach city attorney Jose Smith about whether Gongora had a conflict of interest in voting to nominate the next special master.

“Commissioner Gongora is an attorney with Becker Poliakoff, a firm which regularly appears before the Special Master. Commissioner Gongora has let it be known that he believes the current special master is too tough on violators and should not be retained,” according to a memo submitted by then-Executive Director of the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission Robert Meyers.

Shortly thereafter, Chief Special Master Mario Goderich was replaced by Abraham Laeser, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor.

Meyers concluded that Gongora did not have a conflict of interest because Becker’s clients would not be the only ones to benefit from more lenient enforcement.

In a 1985 news article that called Becker & Poliakoff “the largest condominium law firm in the world,” Gary Poliakoff said the firm’s work had shifted from fighting condo developers to fighting “dissident unit owners.”

Records show the firm has pursued condo owners aggressively, racking up tens of thousands in legal fees that dwarf the value of the disputes in question. At one condo represented by Becker, the Boca View in Boca Raton, the firm’s hard style is clear.

Unit owner Edward Lepselter made the mistake of taking on Becker and Boca View, suing his association over a burst pipe that cost him $1,300.

After a judge ruled in Boca View’s favor, Becker attorneys claimed Lepselter owed them almost $120,000 in attorney fees. The judge set them at $32,000.

“It is abundantly clear that this case was exceedingly over litigated,” then-County Judge Sandra Bosso-Pardo wrote in her response to Becker’s fee request. “The amount claimed in this case shocks the court” as “duplicative, unreasonable, unnecessary and excessive.”

More at https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-ne-surfside-collapse-condo-becker-20210928-oa5xaboljrfcxaptqslzujfita-story.html

LetA (Nevada)
Posts: 2,679

Posted:

They settled with the security company??? Since when is the average jaggoff security guard an engineering expert? I don't get it, but lawyers will always sue wherever there is money and insurance
companies fold like cheap tents.

AugustinD
Posts: 3,698

Posted:

Quote:

Posted By LetA on 05/12/2022 8:13 AM
They settled with the security company???

I know. Plus the security company is paying nearly half the total settlement. All I could find so far to explain this is the following:

Prior to the catastrophe, Champlain Towers had contracted with an alarm contractor that replaced the existing building fire alarm system with a new voice evacuation fire alarm system.

Among other things, it included common-area smoke detectors, manual pull stations, voice evacuation speakers inside each of the apartments and in the common areas throughout the premises, and a remote alarm annunciator located in proximity to the 24-hour guard station in the lobby.

It appears that a manual fire alarm pull station in the lobby of the building was activated before the collapse. Against the foregoing backdrop, issues surrounding liability have arisen due to myriad reports that persons who were able to get out of the building and escape before it collapsed never heard the building fire alarm system activating through its voice evacuation function.

Is a building fire alarm system designed and intended to detect a building collapse? Of course not, but that is not the focus of the forensic and liability investigation in this matter. In 2007, mass notification signaling (MNS) was introduced into NFPA 72 as Annex material.

Then, MNS was incorporated into Chapter 24 of the 2010 Edition of NFPA 72, National Fire Alarm and Signaling Code. The “Emergency Communications Systems” chapter also includes emergency voice alarm communication systems (EVACS).

In the early morning hours of June 24, before the partial building collapse, there are multiple sources of information that confirm the security guard who was working in the lobby at Champlain Towers South was hearing strange sounds coming from within the building. These sounds were so concerning that the guard decided to try and call each of the 129 apartments to tell them to get out of the building.

Early on June 24, 2021, before the partial building collapse, there are multiple sources of information that confirm the security guard who was working in the lobby at Champlain Towers South was hearing strange sounds coming from within the building.

What May Have Gone Awry
It is not axiomatic as to why the building fire alarm system did not function as it was designed and intended to do. Moreover, a determination has not yet been made as to if the security guard who was stationed in the lobby in the early morning hours before the partial building collapse was trained in how to use the system’s onboard all-call voice evacuation feature that would have been heard inside each of the condominium units at Champlain Towers had it been utilized.

Preliminary forensic examination of the central station’s account history report reveals that prior to the building collapse, the fire alarm system was in trouble, and a supervisory condition existed. The underpinnings of what part(s) of the fire alarm system was not functioning correctly and why it had not been restored to a functional mode through performing service on the system is continuing forensically.

Nonetheless, as the professional and technical community of the alarm and central station industry knows, trouble and supervisory conditions need to be addressed on any commercial fire alarm system. In other circumstances, a fire watch needs to be instituted based upon the building occupancy type and/or how long the system will remain nonfunctional.

Stated differently, inspection, testing and maintenance programs should be sold on all fire alarm systems. With that plan in place, the likelihood of addressing and identifying defects and irregularities is enhanced due to the routine nature of the relationship between the alarm contractor and the subscriber.
...

Points of Failure
Notwithstanding the foregoing, in this tragic loss of life, the issues relating to the building fire alarm system may circle around what, if any, difference it would have made had the voice evacuation system in the premises worked, whereby persons in their apartments could have been warned to leave the building immediately.

Notably, the window of opportunity for persons in this building to escape is estimated to be seven to 19 minutes from when the security guard recognized that everyone in the building needed to be warned to evacuate. The clock starts when the security guard recognizes the need to react, and then what, if anything, they did and/or did not do before the building partially collapsed.
...
Four people were rescued from the Champlain Towers South rubble, one dying later. Eleven others were injured; what remained of the partially collapsed building was demolished 10 days later.

Alarm Company Checklist
With this in mind, how many of your accounts are in trouble and/or in supervisory today? How long have they been in trouble and/or in supervisory? Have any of your subscribers refused service, and/or have they refused service based upon the costs it would be to repair their system?

Have any of your subscribers asked for service, and when your technician arrives and analyzes the problem, the customer decides they do not want to have the repairs made? Have you notified the AHJ about any of your subscriber’s fire alarm systems being in a trouble and/or in a supervisory state and that this condition has been present for more than eight hours?

How did you notify the AHJ? Did you leave a message, and/or did you email them? Do you have a record of who you spoke to? If you left a message for an inspector, how do you know if they received the message? Do you provide notice to the owner and/or the AHJ via certified mail return receipt requested when their fire alarm system is not fully functional?

Will your company continue to monitor a fire alarm system if you know it is not fully functional and/or that it is impaired? Have you informed the central station to log only fire troubles? Have you told the central station to log only supervisory conditions?
...
If a fire alarm and/or sprinkler suppression system is not fully functional, is it foreseeable that persons in the building could be seriously injured and/or killed? Is it foreseeable that property damage would be increased if the fire alarm system was not fully functional and/or due to it being put on test by your company and/or your subscriber?

Would anyone and/or everyone have escaped before Champlain Towers South’s building partially collapsed had all persons in the building been warned to evacuate by the premise’s building fire alarm system with voice evacuation? That’s a jury question.

--
More at https://www.securitysales.com/fire-intrusion/life-safety-lessons-miami-condo-collapse/

JohnC46 (South Carolina)
Posts: 14,265

Posted:

I am mildly surprised it has been settled that quickly. As Aug said: there must have been some really good negotiators working on this.

SteveH35 (Washington)
Posts: 339

Posted:

The Miami Herald: Defendants’ payments detailed as lawyers submit $1B Surfside settlement to judge: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article261857020.html

Breakdown of some of the Eighty Seven Park entities’ settlement payments:

8701 Collins Development, $28 million
8701 Collins Avenue Condo Association, $29 million
Bizzi & Partners Development, $16 million
John Moriarty and Associates of Florida, $157 million
NV5, $25.7 million
DeSimone Consulting Engineers, $8.5 million
Stantec Architecture, $25 million
Geosonics, $5 million
Florida Civil, $6.9 million
Western Waterproofing Company of America, $25 million
Concrete Protection & Restoration, $11 million
Morabito Consultants, $16 million
Becker law firm, $31 million

The settlement fund for unit value payouts was also upped to the full appraised value of $96MM.

TimB4 (Tennessee)
Posts: 21,059

Posted:

Don't forget the 30% or more for the attorneys right off the top.

🎯 You've read this entire discussion

Join the conversation with 50,000 HOA & Condo Leaders:

✓ Ask follow-up questions
✓ Share your experience
✓ Get expert advice
✓ Access 350,000 discussions

Create Free Account →
⚡ Takes 30 seconds

Already a member? Log in here

Terms of Use and Privacy Statement