Andrew Hyatt graduated from UTC in 1989 a bachelor’s degree in political science with a concentration in public administration.
The man was barefoot and disheveled when he approached Andy Hyatt on the street in the middle of the night.
“Where? Where would? Where do you? Where do you think you think my wife’s gone?” the man stammered.
A few minutes earlier, he and his wife were safe inside a condo building on the beach in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida.
Then the building collapsed.
It was approximately 1:20 a.m. on June 24, 2021 when Champlain Towers South fell and 12 stories of concrete, metal, glass and anything else inside became a crushing waterfall.
A 1989 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Surfside town manager, Hyatt pointed the man to the nearby community center, where survivors and their loved ones were directed. The man found his wife safe and sound, but 98 people didn’t make it out of the destroyed condo or died later.
The accident drew international attention—Hyatt said he received phone calls from news operations from as far away as Australia—turning the spotlight on Surfside, a town of about 6,000 directly north of Miami Beach. A town where Hyatt had been manager for about seven months.
Until February, Surfside officials weren’t given access to the condo property to investigate the collapse, said Hyatt, who was city manager of the Chattanooga-area community of East Ridge from 2013 to 2015.
The federal National Institute of Standards and Technology was investigating the Florida building collapse. Insurance companies, lawyers and courts were arguing. “Territories” were being claimed with only select people allowed inside while Surfside was forced to stand on the sidelines.
Surfside town lawyers muscled through the barriers, and city officials will soon start their own investigation, but at this point they are only to observe the work of the others, Hyatt said. “To make sure they’re doing what we would’ve wanted.”
He’s not happy.
“Here we are sitting almost eight months after the collapse, and we have not taken our first sample,” he said, irritation saturating his voice.
‘Vivid memories’
Hyatt was asleep when he received the horrifying phone call on June 24, 2021.
“My personal phone rang somewhere around 1:40, 1:45 in the morning,” said Hyatt, a native of Cleveland, Tennessee. “On the other end was my assistant town manager. ‘We’ve had a building collapse. There might be multiple fatalities.'”
Champlain Towers South sat about four blocks from where Hyatt lives and, as he ran down the sidewalk, the first thing that caught his attention was right next to him.
“There’s no traffic, and you know, in most bigger cities now there’s traffic 24 hours a day,” he said.
One thing was in full view, though.
“I also see a lot of red lights, blue lights.”
The collapse was on the beach side of the condo. The side facing the road was intact. Hyatt had to run around the building to see exactly what had happened. The horror hit him just as he turned the building’s corner.
Swarming first responders, spotlights shining on the fallen floors; long, long ladders reaching to upper floors, rescuing people who couldn’t get out. The question in his mind: “How many people are buried under the debris?”
The sight was so overwhelming, it bordered on the unreal, he said, but that quickly disappeared.
“As I saw these ladder trucks and people, I thought, ‘This is not a movie.’
For the first week or so after the collapse—the worst non-hurricane-related disaster in Florida history—searching for survivors was a priority. It wasn’t too long before it became “futile,” and it turned into a search for bodies, Hyatt said.
“There are still some vivid memories.”
The aftermath
Although, as mandated by the state of Florida, the building was in the middle of a 40-year structural review when it fell, the collapse triggered dozens of lawsuits against the building owners and condo association for not maintaining the building.
A tentative deal was announced in last month to pay $83 million to people who suffered economic losses. Lawsuits for wrongful deaths are still in the courts.
Surfside officials currently are testing the sturdiness and safety of other buildings along the beach, including Champlain North Towers, the companion condo to the one that collapsed. The beachfront has dozens of 10- to 12-story condos in the testing phase “to ensure that there’s not any concern, and we can make everybody feel safer,” Hyatt said.
“What do we want to be known as? The town where a building collapsed or the town where we protected and made our citizens safer because of what we learned from a collapse?”
