Miami-Dade deleted critical audio files from Surfside collapse search-and-rescue effort

A Miami-Dade County employee deleted critical audio files chronicling the search-and-rescue effort of the first frantic hours of the Surfside condo collapse, one of the deadliest building disasters in U.S. history, a Paste BN investigation found. 

The audio included communications that Miami-Dade Fire Rescue tactical teams had with central dispatchers as they searched for survivors in the immediate aftermath of the disaster that struck the Champlain Towers South condominium at 1:23 a.m. on June 24.

In all, hundreds of hours of communication from two different radio channels – some of which described in heart-wrenching detail how first responders tried to locate and save victims – were supposed to be recorded and preserved for the public record. 

Nearly two months later, more than 23 hours of those recordings were erased.  

“Regrettably, the audio from the main tactical channel … and the audio from the second tactical channel … were inadvertently not preserved during our exporting process,” said Erika Benitez, a Miami-Dade Fire spokeswoman. “After reviewing what transpired in the retrieval process, we were able to determine it was an honest oversight or error on our part and there was no ill intent. Surfside presented unprecedented circumstances which pushed every system to its limits.” 

The missing audio files covered two time spans from both channels. The first was from roughly 6:30 a.m. to 7 a.m., and the second was from roughly 1 p.m. until midnight. Some of those moments include communication surrounding the attempted rescue of a teenager who was buried under the rubble, as Paste BN reported. 

Repeated equipment failures and the lack of proper tools hindered the effort, Paste BN found. The girl, who communicated with first responders for 10 hours while trapped behind a concrete wall, died after a fire started near rescuers’ sparking tools and forced them to leave.

The employee – who was not identified but verbally reprimanded, according to Miami-Dade Fire officials –was told to archive the audio Aug. 18, emails show. The directive from her supervisor came after a court order to preserve all evidence connected to the collapse. 

Florida law requires public agencies to keep such records for at least 30 days, and Miami-Dade voluntarily does so for 60 days. Miami-Dade County Fire Rescue did not provide documentation on the audio’s deletion but said in a statement it was lost on the 60th day – the same day servers automatically delete unarchived audio recordings.  

A court order dated July 1 required the preservation of everything – including all public records, recordings and documents – that would help explain what caused the condo to fall. The family of Harold Rosenberg, a Surfside resident who was missing, had filed suit, pleading that all evidence be preserved as they searched for him. Rosenberg died in the condo's collapse.

A law firm sent a letter July 21 to the fire department, specifying that such evidence should include documentation immediately after the tragedy, including “photographs, videos or other media depicting the premises of Champlain Towers … during rescue/recovery and clean-up operations.” 

On March 3, after questioning by Paste BN, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue officials drafted two internal policies related to records retention. One policy would streamline the process in which audio public records requests are handled and fulfilled. The other would require the fire department to save audio recordings for major incidents, although it's unclear for how long. The two standard operating procedures have not been finalized and are still in draft form.

The U.S. Department of Commerce deployed the National Institute of Standards and Technology – or NIST – in June to conduct a technical investigation into the collapse. NIST,  which anticipates the Surfside investigation taking two years, would not comment but confirmed that search-and-rescue audio would be looked at in an investigation of this magnitude. 

NIST, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Miami-Dade police and independent investigators are not only trying to determine why the condo collapsed, but they are also reviewing the emergency response. Audio and video records of how officials handled themselves could be part of that. Such reviews help local, state and federal authorities understand how to best respond to disasters.

Walter Copan, NIST’s former director, told Paste BN that investigators will “want to have access to as much information as possible to provide insights into the underpinning causes but also then the response.” 

“As part of its technical investigation,” Copan said, “NIST looks broadly at these other factors that impact how people will respond in the midst of a crisis situation and also the recovery dimensions of that to inform future standards, protocols, in addition to the root causes of the failure.”

Craig Fugate, FEMA director under the Obama administration, told Paste BN that maintaining evidence of the first 24 hours is critical. 

“In general, most of the rescues, where you’re going to save people vs. doing recoveries, are going to be in that first 24 hours,” Fugate said. “Because this was a structural failure, immediate, given everything that’s going on with that, and knowing that lawsuits are already present, these types of communications are of critical importance.”

The Miami-Dade Police Department, which is conducting a homicide investigation into the 98 Surfside deaths, declined to comment. 

Allyn Kilsheimer, who was brought in to investigate the Surfside collapse after spending half a century investigating disasters such as the Sept. 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Mexico City earthquake, said that from an engineering standpoint, fire communications can sometimes help engineering investigators gather clues based on whether first responders described their surroundings and operations. 

“For example: When they were trying to find that young girl, and there were big dumpsters in the way. Obviously something like that is something I would be interested in,” he said. “I would go: ‘Oh, that means the dumpsters that used to be on floor X are now on floor Y, so they must have gone through all those other floors to get there.’ Something like that.”  

Kilsheimer said, “Generally, fire communications focus on the recovery effort, on saving people, so I don’t think it would be a huge thing from an engineering perspective, but you don’t know until you listen to it, and you need the audio in order to determine if there is anything of value.”

Officials failed to disclose omission

Paste BN initially requested the audio files Aug. 6 as part of its investigation into the high-rise condominium's collapse that killed 98 people, most of whom were sleeping when the building crumbled in the pre-dawn hours that Thursday in late June. 

Although Miami-Dade officials realized the files were missing by the time they provided Paste BN a portion of the audio Aug. 27, they did not reveal the omission, nor would they answer repeated questions about it when a reporter discovered it.   

Two months after Paste BN submitted another records request for the audio in January, Miami-Dade officials finally admitted that a portion of the recordings had been deleted.  

Emails obtained by Paste BN show that Miami-Dade officials tried to recover the missing audio as early as Aug. 25 but were not successful.  

The only known record of those files, they told Paste BN this week, exists on a third-party website called Broadcastify.

Broadcastify's website says it “cannot guarantee the accuracy, integrity or quality” of its audio, which is uploaded by members of the public, usually under an alias, as was the case with the Surfside audio. 

“It doesn’t meet the same requirements as a public agency,” said Broadcastify’s CEO, Lindsay C. Blanton III. “We’re an all-volunteer organization primarily for entertainment purposes and should be considered as such.”  

Blanton noted that “since most of the streams are provided by volunteers – there is a possibility that what is sent to us could be incomplete or edited.”  

Frank LoMonte, former director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, said the fact the audio exists only on an unofficial, third-party website is problematic. 

“It’s just dumb luck that it happened to show up, but you don’t have the guarantee that it's a complete and authentic record,” he said. “I don’t think an agency can say, ‘We found something that looks like our record, sitting in somebody else's attic,’ and be in full compliance with their open records law. … You’re entitled to the official copy, and that’s not the official copy.”

Though Broadcastify warns of its unreliability, Miami-Dade Fire Department officials stressed that they are “confident that the missing audio was indeed captured via this service” because they cross-referenced the abbreviated transcriptions of the dispatch communications.

Paste BN could not verify whether or not the audio was complete because it does not have the original to compare.  

“I cannot imagine the ability to show reliability, show lack of tampering or being able to lay the predicate to have that admitted as evidence in court,” said Bruce Lehr, who worked with Janet Reno at the Office of the State Attorney in Miami-Dade where he was the chief prosecutor for the Dade County courts and senior trial attorney in the narcotics divisions.  

Lehr, who specializes in criminal defense, said, “The question becomes, how are you going to lay the predicate to get it into evidence, how are you going to have someone testify that it accurately depicts the conversation that was actually had between the fire department. If it could be anonymously downloaded, I think you’ve got a problem laying a predicate.”