Miami Apartment Building Collapses, 99 People Remain Missing - Plus, More Details Revealed

An apartment building in Florida partially collapsed in the early morning hours of Thursday morning (June 24) and 99 people remain missing.

The 136-unit apartment complex called Champlain Towers, which is located in Surfside, Florida, partially collapsed at around 1:23am.

A resident who lives in the building said he woke up to “a bang that just kept on going,” according to the Miami Herald.

55 of the 136 units collapsed and 35 people were pulled out of the rubble. 10 more people were assessed and treated at the scene, while two of them were hospitalized. One of those two people sadly died from their injuries, according to CNN.

Click inside for more details on the disaster…

“It’s bad,” Frank Rollason, director of Miami-Dade Emergency Management, told the Herald. “We got some people out. They had to cut away railings… Everyone who is alive is out the building.”

One report said that a woman’s leg had to be amputated to save her from the rubble.

New details have been revealed about what might have led to the collapse.

Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University, told USA Today that the building had been sinking into the ground since the 1990s. The building was built in 1981.

“I looked at it this morning and said, ‘Oh my god.’ We did detect that,” he said. “We saw this building had some kind of unusual movement.”

Wdowinski‘s research focused on the parts of Miami that were sinking and a mention of a “12-story condominium” appeared in just one line of the study. He said, “We didn’t give it too much importance.”

We’re sending our thoughts and condolences to anyone affected by this tragedy.