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Alfredo and Marian Lopez were asleep when the first thundering blast jolted them awake. Moments later, a second boom, much louder than the first, shook the couple’s bed in their sixth-floor Surfside, Florida apartment.
Alfredo, 61, rushed to wake his 24-year-old son Michael, urging him to get dressed quickly. Then he ran to the window.
“All I could see was just white dust, very thick,” he said. “I could barely see the balcony railing.”
The lights cut out and the emergency alarm sounded, warning residents of Champlain Towers South to evacuate. Alfredo Lopez thought about putting on sneakers, but his hands were shaking so badly from fear he knew he couldn’t tie the laces. He settled on sandals with straps.
FLORIDA HIGH-RISE EVACUATED OVER STRUCTURAL CONCERNS FOLLOWING SURSIDE CONDO COLLAPSE
Marian Lopez, 67 was disoriented. She fumbled for shoes as her husband urged her to move quickly.
For two decades, the family has lived on the street side of the condo tower. Alfredo used to joke to his wife she’d have to bury him there. On June 24, it very nearly happened.
When he opened the front door that night, half of the building was gone. A jagged five-foot chunk of flooring barely left enough room to escape.
“There was no hallway, no ceiling, no apartments, no walls, nothing.”
He remembered being frozen in terror.
“I was petrified. I really thought, ‘This is it. We are going to die.'”
Sometimes, the line between life and death in such a calamity can be as seemingly random as whether an apartment had an ocean or street view. While 126 residents, mostly from the ocean-view units, are among the missing nine days later, many others barely escaped.
With the elevator collapsed, the survivors descended the cracked stairwell that had separated from the wall, along the way helping neighbors they met for the first time and others they’d known for years. They were all “joined through this tragedy for forever now,” said resident Albert Aguero, who helped an 88-year-old stranger to safety.
While their escape felt agonizingly long, it unfolded in mere minutes. In those perilous moments, before the world knew of the more than the 22 people who perished and the many missing, they were fighting to survive.
“When I opened the staircase door and half the staircase was missing, at that point I know we’re racing against time to all get out as a family,” Aguero said.
Down on the first floor, recent college graduate Gabriel Nir had just finished a late-night workout and was in his kitchen cooking salmon. The rest of the family would normally be asleep, but his 15-year-old sister had just returned from babysitting and was in the shower, his dad was out of town and his mom had just come home from an event.
They all heard the first ominous rumble. They knew the building was undergoing construction and had been irritated by the incessant noise, but this felt different – more thunderous.
Sara Nir, Gabriel’s mother, ran to the lobby, asking the security guard if she’d seen anything.
Back in the kitchen, concrete dust billowed into their apartment from the patio windows near the pool. The ground was shaking as 25-year-old Gabriel ran to the bathroom.
“We have to go now!” he screamed to his sister. They ran to the lobby, where their mother urged the security guard to call 911. The guard was too rattled to remember the address, so Gabriel phoned.
“Please hurry, please hurry,” he begged the dispatcher.
Outside, he saw that the car deck had caved into the parking garage. Car alarms were blaring, emergency lights were flashing and water from ruptured pipes was rapidly filling the garage.
He ran back to the lobby, where the dust cloud was making it difficult to see. Residents from upstairs were running out the door screaming, many still in pajamas. One man pushed a baby stroller.
It was getting harder to breathe. The rumbling intensified, as Gabriel ushered his mom and sister into the street.
“Run, run!” he yelled.
Rocks and other debris pelted his head as he turned back. It would be a sight that would haunt him days later.
“I saw the building turning into a white dust,” he said. “I heard people screaming.”
His first instinct was to go back inside. “I have to make sure everyone’s OK,” he thought.
But it was too late.
Up on the 11th floor, Aguero stared in disbelief at the gaping holes in the elevator shaft.
BIDEN VISITING SURFSIDE CONDO COLLAPSE SITE, WILL MEET WITH FAMILIES OF THOSE MISSING
Days later, Gorfinkel called the Agueros to thank them for saving her life. Alvarez, too, is adamant she wouldn’t have survived without the Lopez family.
“Thanks to him and his son, we were able to climb that rubble.”
Days later, the Agueros, and the Nir and Lopez families, are safe. They embrace their children and siblings tighter, knowing many of their neighbors are gone.
For now, the survivors have no homes. Their possessions are gone. Clothes, computers, cars, even prescription medicine. It’s inconvenient, they say, but it doesn’t really matter. They are alive.
At night, they still hear the screams, and the terror comes rushing back.
“The first few days, I had horrible survivor’s guilt,” said Lopez, a deeply religious man.
Gabriel Nir finds it difficult to sleep. He tries to stay busy, to push away the what-ifs.
“It’s like a virus. it just never goes away,” he said sadly. “I wish I could have done more … These people that are missing, they aren’t coming back.”
His family is crammed into a nearby donated hotel room. His voice is still filled with adrenaline. Days later, he’s talks as if on fast-forward, clipped and frantic. Like his escape.
Nir says his near-death experience has taught him something valuable.
“Check on your loved ones … it’s only one life,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, today, tomorrow, the next hour.”
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Alvarez, too, is filled with grief. Hilda Noriega, her mother’s best friend, is among the dead.
She hasn’t been in a bed since that night, can’t bring herself to crawl under the covers. She sleeps in a chair instead.
“The people in the rubble, I could hear them. Some were yelling ‘help,'” she said.
“That will haunt me forever. I will never forget that.”