By Ilana Siyance
The Champlain Towers South, which tragically collapsed on June 24, marked one of the deadliest structural collapses in American history, accounting for 98 confirmed deaths, 11 injuries and the destruction of 136 apartments.
The 12-story beachfront tower in Surfside has already seen a flood of some two dozen lawsuits. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, plaintiff lawyers say it would take about $1 billion to compensate everyone fairly. The pool of money currently available from the insurance policy, however, is just $50 million. As per the attorneys and court filings, the available funds is not nearly enough to compensate those who suffered property damage, much less for those who lost loved ones or suffered long-term injuries. The insurance “will obviously be inadequate to compensate everyone fully to the extent of their horror,” Judge Michael Hanzman of the 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida said at an early hearing. “There’s going to be a very serious allocation issue between those people who tragically lost loved ones and were lucky enough to only lose property.”
The litigation and potential payouts is severely limited as the main defendant in the case is a nonprofit condo board, not a wealthy developer or large public corporation. Similar calamities, which involved vast companies, led to settlements in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, said Chip Merlin, president of the Tampa-based Merlin Law Group, which is a co-counsel in the class action. In 1981, when the suspended walkways in the lobby of a Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City collapsed killed 114 people, a class action produced an approximately $140 million settlement, adjusted for inflation that would be about $420 million with today’s valuation.
The Florida lawsuits allege that the condo board failed to protect the building’s residents by making necessary repairs and monitoring for signs of disrepair. Most of the lawsuits are expected to be consolidated in a class-action suit. Judge Hanzman has already indicated that it may be necessary to sell the building’s land, which may be worth about $100 million, to raise more money for the settlements. Such a sale would be complicated by the fact that some of the residents will want the option to move back into the newly rebuilt apartments and others may want a memorial on the site, attorneys told the WSJ.
“I don’t know if there is any amount of money that could adequately compensate these victims and their families for the loss of life and other injuries they have suffered,” Michael Goldberg, the receiver appointed to manage the condo board’s assets, said in an email.
