Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Ask Amy: Boyfriend’s CPA dad did my taxes wrong for years

Miss Manners: I think kindergarten graduations are ‘ridiculous’

Carolyn Hax: Is checking his phone the best way to prove he isn’t lying anymore?

As U.S. rushes to send military aid, Ukrainians applaud lobbying effort

An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India

Scotland leader Humza Yousaf resigns in latest setback for independence 

The new face of flooding

Where seas are rising at alarming speed 

Red carpet looks from the White House correspondents’ dinner

Election 2024 latest news: Trump, Biden returning to campaign trail this week

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Tensions grow between Trump and Lake in Arizona race for Senate 

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

The Fed’s fight against inflation needs to lose the dot plot

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

How to train for a marathon on vacation

Middle East conflict live updates: Britain urges Hamas to accept ‘very generous’ 40-day Gaza cease-fire deal

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

The Rangers swept the Capitals, and it’s time for the new core to take charge

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

Meta’s oversight body prepares to lay off workers

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

Chiropractor works on giraffe, is nuzzled: ‘Giraffes are just giant dogs?’

An SUV was in flames on the highway. Strangers saved the driver.  

 Donald Trump Speaks During A Campaign Rally In Green Bay Wisconsin

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

James Cornsilk

Drea Cornejo

The 12-story condominium tower that crashed down early Thursday near Miami Beach was built on reclaimed wetlands and is perched on a barrier island facing an ocean that has risen about a foot in the past century because of climate change.

Underneath its foundation is sand and organic fill — over a plateau of porous limestone — brought in from the bay after the mangroves were deforested. The fill sinks naturally, and the <a href="https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/382/207/2020/" target=_blank>subsidence worsens</a> as the water table rises.

Investigators are just beginning to try to unravel what caused the Champlain Towers South to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/24/surfside-building-collapse-miami-dade/" target="_blank">collapse into a heap of rubble</a>, leaving at least 159 people missing as of Friday. Experts on sea-level rise and climate change caution that it is too soon to speculate whether rising seas helped destabilize the oceanfront structure. The 40-year-old building was relatively new compared with others on its stretch of beach in the town of Surfside.

But it is already clear that South Florida has been on the front lines of sea-level rise and that the effects of climate change on the infrastructure of the region — from septic systems to aquifers to shoreline erosion — will be a management problem for years.

Zack Wittman

The Champlain Towers South building was recently found to have been sinking in the 1990s and may have continued to sink since then, according to Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University’s department of earth and environment who has studied the area.

Wdowinski co-wrote a paper published in April 2020 that said satellite imagery showed a 12-story condominium building in the eastern part of the Miami Beach area had sunk by about two millimeters per year between 1993 and 1999. Wdowinski said in an interview Thursday that it was the Champlain Towers South building.

“I was shocked to see it collapsed,” Wdowinski said.

Land subsidence is a gradual settling or sudden sinking of the surface when material that supports it is displaced or removed, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Erosion and the disappearance of groundwater are two of several factors that cause it.

Wdowinski, whose findings were first reported by USA Today, cautioned that it was not clear whether the subsidence he found was connected to the building’s collapse.

“It appears to be something very localized to one building, so I would think the problem was more likely to be related to the building itself,” he said.

The roof on the 136-unit building was being replaced and other repairs were planned, according to an attorney for the condominium association, Kenneth Direktor. He said the building was “thoroughly inspected” recently as part of a process in which buildings in Surfside must be recertified every 40 years and that the report on the inspection had been completed.

“There was nothing in the report that would have indicated a life-safety concern,” Direktor said.

Jim McGuinness, Surfside’s building official, said the city was aware that the report was close to being completed but that officials were still awaiting its submission.

Miami and nearby beach communities have experienced substantial sea-level rise, up to 12 inches over the past century, according to some estimates.

That includes nearly six inches since the mid-1990s, according to a Capital Weather Gang <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/08/analysis-sea-level-rise-is-combining-with-other-factors-regularly-flood-miami/" target="_blank">analysis of federal data</a>. That has led to a 320 percent jump in nuisance flooding in the area over the past 23 years.

According to a <a href="https://www.miamigov.com/files/assets/public/document-resources/pdf-docs/capital-improvements/miami-stormwater-mp_es.pdf" target=_blank>new storm-water master plan</a> released by the city of Miami in April, it would have to spend nearly $4 billion over the next 40 years to protect the city from floods that result from sea-level rise.

The money would be spent on six-foot-high sea walls, massive underground pipes and wells to control a rapid influx of water. Regardless of how much the city spends, some residents would have to retreat from areas that cannot be protected from flooding.

The porous limestone underneath Miami allows the rising seas to filter up through the ground, causing flooding during high tides even on sunny days. The groundwater surge threatens freshwater supplies and septic systems, which are already failing in Miami-Dade County.

The mix of swelling groundwater and tidal cycles juiced by climate change means coastal buildings and their concrete foundations spend more time in water than they did in the past, said Albert Slap, the chief executive of RiskFootprint, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that assesses buildings’ vulnerability to hazards such as storm surge and flooding.

“This is a tragic, devastating event, and it could be a canary-in-the-coal-mine-type event,” he said. “It’s not just one building. This could be something that could affect other buildings.”

Slap noted that many coastal structures built on sand that have underground parking lots already rely on around-the-clock sump pumps to keep out groundwater.

“The groundwater enters the pores of the concrete and ultimately weakens it and erodes it,” he said. “So the foundations are subject to a lot of geological forces that could compact the soil underneath. It could cause voids. We just don’t know.”

Video from the scene of the collapse showed rescue workers in the basement parking garage working in knee-deep water, although the source of that water was unclear.

Harold R. Wanless, a professor at the University of Miami and an expert on sea-level rise, cautioned that there are too many other possible explanations for the building collapse to speculate whether sea-level rise played a role in the tragedy. But investigators need to get to the bottom of that, he said.

“We’ve got to find out what it is,” he said, “because it makes living or working in high-rises very unattractive right now. Why did this happen?”

Wanless said the area of the collapse in Surfside was still a few feet above normal sea level. One of the possibilities that must be taken into consideration is whether a sinkhole or some type of collapse happened under the building, he said, but he added that the area has not been known for sinkholes.

“About 20 feet down is limestone, but that’s not an area that has had any sinkholes that I’m aware of,” he said.

A search of the Florida Geologic Survey’s site for sinkhole reports in the area of the building’s address on Collins Avenue yields no results. Unlike Miami, which is more prone to sinkholes, Miami Beach is an area where the FGS says “sinkholes are few, shallow, of small diameter and develop gradually.”

“There’s no reason for this building to go down like that, unless someone literally pulls out the supports from underneath, or they get washed out, or there’s a sinkhole or something like that, because it just went down,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said at a news conference Thursday morning.

Another Surfside official, Commissioner Eliana R. Salzhauer, also questioned whether the land underneath the building had been compromised.

“I think this is all tied to sea-level rise and our overdevelopment,” she said. “And Mother Earth comes back, and the ocean comes back, and takes it.”

Miami has also long suffered from “king tides,” higher-than-normal tides caused by alignments of the sun and moon that have been exacerbated by rising sea levels from melting glaciers and polar ice. These tides, which tend to be strongest in the fall, have routinely caused flooding in the city.

The Army Corps of Engineers recently proposed a $6 billion sea wall up to 20 feet high running six miles along the coast to protect against storm surge. It would not cover Surfside, nor would it protect from tidal flooding elsewhere in the city.

<i>Tim Craig contributed to this report.</i>

The Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism 2018

Fellow at Woodrow Wilson Center, spring 2013

Fellow at Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, fall 2012

Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award 2010

A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster 

Duke University, BA, 2000

Columbia University, MS in journalism, 2002

Columbia University, MA in international relations, 2003

Joshua Partlow is a reporter on the The Washington Post’s national desk. He has served previously as the bureau chief in Mexico City, Kabul, Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Baghdad. 

Josh Partlow

Pulitzer Prize, explanatory journalism 2020, 

Society for Environmental Journalists, explanatory journalism, 2019

Pulitzer Prize finalist, explanatory journalism, 2022

MDDC Press Association, Best of Show, Tampa Bay’s Coming Storm, 2017

Hammett Award, Finalist, Russell Program, Presbyterian College, 1995

Associated Press of Georgia, Second Place, Feature Writing/Major Newspapers, 1994

Howard University, Journalism

St. Petersburg College, Mass Communications

Darryl Fears covers national environmental justice and climate. He joined the Post in 1999 as a reporter on the Metro Desk and moved to the National Desk in 2001 to cover race. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for explanatory reporting on climate warming and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2022 for national reporting on environmental racism.

Darryl Fears

Jim Morrison

Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, 2016

Society of Professional Journalists Award for public service, 2016

Online News Association Award for topical reporting, 2016

Peabody Awards finalist, 2016

Emmy Awards finalist, 2016

University of Cambridge, BA

City University of London, PG Dip

Jon Swaine joined The Washington Post's investigative team in 2019. He previously worked as a senior reporter for The Guardian, and as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.

Jon Swaine

Indiana University, BA in journalism

Caroline Anders is a researcher for The Daily 202 and The 5-Minute Fix.

Before condo collapse, rising seas long pressured Miami coastal properties

Authorities and scientists say it’s too soon to say whether rising seas played a role in the fall of Champlain Towers South