On-site report from Surfside, Florida

By Yochonon Donn, Surfside, Florida
Photos: Carlos Chattah,  AP Images

Surfside is a sunny town now cloaked in the dark garment of unfathomable agony and interminable waiting. Days after a massive apartment complex mysteriously gave a series of shudders and imploded, this Miami suburb of 5,700 residents has been transformed.

Much of Collins Avenue, the miles-long first main boulevard off the beach, containing dozens of beachfront hotel entrances, restaurants, and lots of shopping, is now blocked off, filled instead by hundreds of emergency vehicles flashing red, blue, and white lights, yellow crime scene tape, and dozens of white parasols where members of the international media spend their days waiting for things to happen.

As I walk down the avenue, people stop and offer their prayers. Neon signs declaring “Prayers for Our Surfside Neighbors” are ubiquitous. A short, elderly woman with a Christian symbol dangling from her neck stops me, cups her palms heavenward, and urges me to “pray, pray.” As I enter the Grand Beach Hotel, housing family members of those missing, a tall man with a graying goatee and a cap identifying him as a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars walks up the steep incline to the hotel. He says he’s a Baptist pastor and wants to pray with the relatives.

A town dotted with picturesque high-rises and gigantic apartment complexes, Surfside is about a third Orthodox Jewish and a third Hispanic. Many of its residents are retired and don’t hesitate to smile and wave to me as I pass their morning tea groups in the wooden gazebos that are everywhere. Collins Avenue is a one-way, three-lane avenue that bisects the entire neighborhood and heads north toward Bal Harbour; to the left are single- or double-story buildings, streets with no traffic lights, and a no-sidewalk road that has a countryside feel. To the east, dozens of apartment buildings and hotels appear to scrape the sky — separating the peninsula from the great blue Atlantic Ocean right behind.

And the ground zero of it all is the former Champlain Towers South, at 8777 Collins Avenue. The complex — a trio of towers — has 136 units, most of them occupied full-time. The north and south towers were erected in 1981, while the east tower went up in 1994. All three were built by the same developer. The catastrophe is the nation’s first unexplained building collapse in nearly half a century, ever since a federal Drug Enforcement Administration building in Miami suddenly imploded, killing seven people. It was that disaster that led the county to require inspections of buildings that are over 40 years old. The Champlain Towers had just begun work to comply with the 40-year review.

Last Wednesday night will remain indelible to one elderly woman. She spoke to her granddaughter, Malky Weisz, a Lakewood resident, who, along with her husband Benny, was visiting her father, Harry Rosenberg, a resident of the Champlain Towers.

“She told me I was the best bubby in the world,” the grandmother recalled tearfully.

The Weiszes and Mr. Rosenberg are among the 150 people missing after several days of trying to dig through tons of cement and debris, as 12 floors pancaked to the ground just a few hours after Mrs. Weisz spoke to her grandmother.