By itself, there was nothing remarkable about the document.
It looked like every engineering proposal I’ve seen in more than a decade of board service: a cover letter, a scope of work, photographs, technical observations, cost estimates. The language was careful, measured, almost clinical, because engineers are trained to describe conditions, not emotions.
But buried inside those ordinary pages were several observations that, taken together, described a building in far more trouble than anyone appreciated. The Structural Field Survey Report that Morabito Consultants delivered to the Champlain Towers South board, in Surfside, Florida, in October 2018 documented failed waterproofing beneath the pool deck, abundant cracking and spalling in the parking garage below, exposed rebar, and earlier repairs so poorly executed that they had already failed. The underlying cause was traced to the original 1979 construction documents: the waterproofing beneath the pool deck had been laid on a flat slab rather than a sloped one, causing water to pool on the membrane rather than drain away — and then spent decades patiently attacking the concrete beneath it. The accompanying estimate put the probable repair bill at roughly $9.1 million.
On June 24, 2021, part of the building collapsed. Ninety-eight people died.
Morabito’s report existed years before the tragedy. What happened inside that boardroom between the report and the collapse may never be fully known. Not after a comprehensive five-year investigation. Not as YouTube channels dissect every technical conclusion. Not as armchair experts on LinkedIn repost every tidbit that surfaces, treating it as a smoking gun. And not when books and documentaries are produced, telling the very human stories of people who died and survived, and potentially filling in missing pieces of a tragic story.
Even with missing details, the technical causes are now much clearer than they were in the immediate aftermath. The harder questions to reconcile have nothing to do with engineering, structural integrity, or what’s happened in the years since.
They belong to sociologists, psychologists, behavioral economists, risk-management researchers, and organizational behavior specialists:
A structural report, by itself, changes nothing. Only coordinated action does. That observation — rooted in human behavior — is one of the less obvious takeaways that can confound nearly every other method for preventing tragedies like the Champlain Towers South collapse from happening again.
On June 22, 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released its technical findings on the cause of the collapse, after nearly five years of physical evidence review, testing, and analysis. NIST’s final report — which will include the full evidence record and recommendations for changes to building codes and standards — is still being written. Still, the causal findings released in June reflect the agency’s conclusions. The details of the collapse and its causes have been identified and documented; the report now being produced will memorialize all the evidence and related information that led to NIST’s conclusions.
The failure did not begin at 1:22 a.m. on June 24, as previously thought. It began roughly three weeks earlier, in early June 2021, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck slab suffered what engineers call punching-shear failures. Those two failures didn’t immediately bring the building down. Instead, the surrounding portions of the pool deck and street-level parking structure absorbed and redistributed the load above, increasing the strain on neighboring connections that were already compromised. Over the following weeks, that strain spread until the pool deck slab broke away, damaging the connections supporting the tower itself and allowing the collapse to cascade first through the Middle section and subsequently to the East.
Why were the margins against failure so narrow to begin with? NIST’s investigators point to two causes working together:
Decades of added loads — larger, heavier hardscaping than the original design called for — combined with long-term corrosion and inadequate preventive maintenance narrowed those margins further still.
Forty years between the design error and the failures. Two and a half years between the engineer’s report and the tragedy. Three weeks between the first failure and the tower collapse. Three different countdown clocks, all attached to the same building. None of them is visible from a lounge chair on the deck.
That is the entire logic of structural governance in a nutshell. Deterioration compounds silently over decades. Visible symptoms — spalling balconies, cracked garage columns — understate what’s happening inside the concrete. And once failure begins, the time available for a decision is measured in weeks, not years.
That is why waterproofing, of all unglamorous things, occupies so much space in Florida’s post-collapse statute, and why engineers treat a flat slab under a membrane as a serious finding rather than a technicality. Deferring maintenance doesn’t halt a building’s deterioration. Its structural condition is compromised regardless of what the budget calendar says, making every year a board delays acting more expensive to repair and, at some point, more dangerous.
A volunteer board cannot be expected to know any of that on its own, which is exactly the point of what follows.
Long before I began consulting with boards, I experienced this from the other side of the table.
The day after I was elected to the board of the association where I served, the construction manager asked if I had time for coffee. I assumed he wanted to congratulate a newly elected director. Instead, he wanted to tell me something I would never have thought to ask. The community’s courtyards and garages below them, he explained, would eventually need to be completely rebuilt. Not repaired. Rebuilt from the ground up. Nothing had failed. Nobody was in danger. But after working there for a couple of years, he knew what was beneath the surface, and he wanted the incoming board to understand what was coming. His estimate was roughly $4 million.
I had been on the board for less than 24 hours. I was learning something about courtyards that most residents saw only as amenities: prized outdoor space, covered parking below. That conversation was a seismic shift in my thinking.
More than a decade later, that project is finally being completed, and a $4 million price tag would have been welcome. When I think about it, the conversation is what strikes me the most. I didn’t ask any questions because I didn’t yet know what questions to ask. Yet that construction manager answered it anyway — and in doing so, he armed us with one of the most valuable assets for capital decisions: time.
Something similar happened years later, after the collapse, as New Jersey began debating legislation on structural integrity. The people who brought this to our attention were the professionals we worked with already — one of our attorneys, our accountant, and our management company. They reached out in their capacities with New Jersey’s chapter of the Community Associations Institute (CAI).
They explained the situation: the collapse of Champlain Towers South had spurred legislative and regulatory activity in state capitals and localities, including New Jersey’s capital, Trenton, where calls for statewide action were gaining traction. While they could not predict the outcome of those debates, they felt comfortable saying that any formal action would lead to higher costs for condominiums like ours, even if it resulted in additional one-time inspections. CAI, we learned, was already working at the state and national levels on the association’s behalf — making sure our voice was in the room as the legislation was shaped.
Nobody was selling anything, and nobody was manufacturing alarm. They were answering the question we had not yet realized we needed to ask: what should we be preparing for?
When the legislation was eventually passed, our board wasn’t scrambling to understand the new inspection requirements for the first time. Conversations had already been had. Ground had been laid. We had already introduced the issue at our annual homeowner meeting, planting seeds with owners, whatever the outcome.
That experience permanently changed my standard for professional service. Technical expertise is the price of admission — the credentials, the sealed drawings, the letters after the name. I’m not qualified to evaluate any of that myself, so I have to trust it, the way any board member trusts a lawyer with the law or an engineer with a structure. But a board’s responsibilities span far more ground than any one professional’s expertise, and that’s where credentials stop being enough.
What distinguishes the professionals worth keeping is what they’re willing to do once we’re past their area of technical mastery: to say “you have a blind spot, and you need an independent architect, not another engineer,” and to keep advising us once we’re standing in genuine ambiguity, not a clean textbook case.
An expert’s natural habitat is the conference room, the sealed report, the controlled environment where the answer is knowable. A board member’s natural habitat is the swamp — competing priorities, incomplete information, and decisions that have to get made anyway. Boards rarely need more experts. They need strategic partners: professionals willing, able, and comfortable wading into that swamp instead of waiting at its edge for the water to clear.
Board members operate in an environment of “we don’t know what we don’t know.” Having a lawyer, accountant, or HVAC specialist who’s willing to meet us in that space and walk a mile in our shoes carries a lot more weight than the most qualified yet inflexible expert whose mindset is “stay between the lines.”
When lawmakers responded to the collapse, the first question was obvious: how do we make sure another building doesn’t fail without anyone knowing it’s in trouble? The answer seemed straightforward — require inspections. Florida moved first, New Jersey followed, and for a brief moment, structural integrity appeared to be an engineering problem.
Then reality intervened. As inspections began uncovering deteriorated concrete, corroded reinforcing steel, failed waterproofing, and decades of deferred maintenance, boards encountered a second question every bit as difficult as the first: how do we pay for all of this? For many associations, the honest answer was that, after years of underfunded reserves and optimistic budgeting, they couldn’t — not yet. Inspection laws had exposed a financial problem that had existed all along.
Florida’s Building Safety Act, effective in May 2022, reflected that realization by pairing the two requirements from the start. Qualifying buildings three stories and higher must undergo milestone inspections — at 30 years of occupancy, or 25 years near the coast, and every 10 years thereafter. They must also commission a Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS) covering specified structural components, with funding that boards can no longer waive or reduce. One system identifies deterioration; the other prepares the association to respond.
New Jersey arrived at the same destination in stages. P.L. 2023, c.214, effective January 2024, established recurring structural inspections of the primary load-bearing system for covered buildings and statewide capital-reserve study requirements built to CAI standards, with a 30-year funding plan updated at least every five years. In 2025, the Legislature revisited funding mechanics, capping reduced-funding methods at five years while preserving the 30-year funding plan as a compliant path — flexibility aimed at preventing the kind of sudden, large assessments that themselves become a governance crisis.
Other jurisdictions took partial steps. Maryland extended reserve-study requirements statewide. Tennessee required qualifying associations to obtain and update reserve studies and review funding annually. Hawaii mandated 30-year reserve projections in association budgets. New Castle County, Delaware, went further than its state, adopting a local ordinance requiring façade and structural inspections for qualifying buildings. Virginia convened a study group; Colorado considered reserve legislation and did not pass it.
The approaches differ. The underlying philosophy is remarkably consistent: don’t wait for visible failure, and don’t discover problems you have no plan to pay for.
| Jurisdiction | Structural inspection required | Reserve funding required | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | Yes — milestone inspection, buildings 3+ stories | Yes — SIRS, non-waivable | Most comprehensive framework; hard 365-day repair deadline |
| New Jersey | Yes — covered buildings, load-bearing systems | Yes — CAI-standard study, 30-year plan | Funding rules gain flexibility, easing the sudden-assessment risk |
| New Castle County, DE | Yes — local ordinance, buildings 4+ stories | No | County-level only, not statewide |
| Maryland | No | Yes — statewide reserve study | Reserve funding only, no inspection mandate |
| Tennessee | No | Yes — reserve study, annual review | Reserve funding only, no inspection mandate |
| Hawaii | No | Yes — 30-year reserve projection | Disclosure-focused; no inspection mandate |
| Virginia | No | No | Study group only; no mandate enacted |
| Colorado | No | No | Reserve legislation proposed, did not pass |
Engineers document conditions. Reserve specialists calculate funding needs. Attorneys explain legal obligations. Property managers coordinate operations. Each profession performs a different function, and none of those functions automatically creates urgency.
To an engineer, a report may document substantial deterioration that could lead to catastrophic failure. To a volunteer director reading it after work on a Tuesday night, the worst-case scenario for the same report is the financial impact on their own finances and those of their neighbors.
Board members are often comfortable meeting in boardrooms, but they don’t know something is urgent unless a professional on their roster says so. They may not realize they’re waiting on a call that may never come.
That’s why professionals willing to wade into the swamp matter as much as they do. It’s another unglamorous role: the one who sits down with the board to compare worst-case scenarios, explain severity while there’s still time to act, and commit to having as many conversations as it takes to keep the plan on track.
Increasingly, the most effective professionals are producing far more than reports. They’re helping boards understand what those reports mean, what decisions they trigger, which other professionals need to become involved, and which conversations can no longer wait for next year’s budget cycle. That is not practicing outside one’s expertise. It is practicing within it more completely.
An engineer should feel comfortable saying, “You need to begin talking with your reserve specialist.” A reserve specialist should feel comfortable saying, “These findings need to go to your engineer.” An attorney should feel comfortable saying, “This report is going to require financial planning long before it requires legal action.” None of those statements crosses a professional line. They simply acknowledge that no single discipline protects a building on its own.
The report is the beginning of the process, not the end of it. A board that handles it well does something like this:
Milestone inspection. A mandated structural inspection performed on qualifying buildings at specified ages, designed to identify deterioration before failure. Florida’s schedule — 30 years from occupancy, 25 near the coast, then every 10 years — is the prototype.
Phase 1 / Phase 2 inspection. Phase 1 is a visual evaluation by a licensed architect or engineer; if no substantial deterioration is found, the inspection generally concludes there. Phase 2 is triggered by significant deterioration and can involve testing, destructive investigation, and a repair plan.
Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS). Florida’s required reserve study for qualifying buildings focused on statutorily specified structural components, with funding that cannot be waived or reduced.
Reserve study. A long-range capital planning document that estimates remaining useful life for key building components and systems, assigns a replacement cost, and recommends the annual contributions needed to fund future work. [Link to companion reserve-funding pillar content].
Fiduciary duty. The legal obligation requiring directors to act in the association’s best interests. Two duties apply most directly here: duty of care (making informed decisions using the information and professional guidance available) and duty to act within authority (operating within the law and the association’s governing documents). Courts, insurers, and lenders increasingly evaluate both through the same lens: what the board knew, or reasonably should have known, and how it responded.
