that no one ever thought if the maintenance wasn t done on the buildings they wouldn t fall down like that but i m sure we ll never think that again. listen, we don t know, right? we don t know. i think the main thing we don t know is, you know, we have the inspection and whatever people can say, looks like the medal was rusting and the concrete, you know, was damaged and all of that. but we don t know what s going on beneath the surface there if there is what kind of emotion there could be. you have hurricanes. you have erosion, all kinds of things happening beneath the building. that s certainly a huge factor and it is an unknown at this point. it really is and i think that, you know, that is one thing, one of many that the engineers will look at. they will look at what the condition of the pilings were in because those pilings are the legs that hold the building up and if those legs are weakened
16 years now? 16 years in may. you were down there when you got the april letter from the condo board talking about the damage to the building accelerating and explaining there was going to be a $15 million assessment. was it clear to you between the letter and what you seen firsthand that the building was in bad shape? what did you think? yeah, i really thought the building was in bad shape. new year s eve of 2018 it was brought to my attention by somebody that said it was a contractor and showed me structural cracks on my side of the building. he blamed it on the building next door when they were putting pilings in. he showed me there was cracks on the side wall on the side of the pool and he was mapping this out for me in the sand. it was new year s eve and that was the last time i saw this guy. he said it was a building next door. this is listen, this is what he believes and not been
relate to this, right? we all go into buildings. we all have loved ones that, you know, one minute they re fine and we worry what will happen the next minute. it s just a terrible situation. it is a terrible situation but you know what? this is what happens when people, as you heard, the man john torres who owns a condo in the building, he says according to him, nobody could ever agree on anything. everybody was talking over each other. that is what is happening in washington. nobody is listening and talking at each other instead of with each other. look, republicans could have an independent bipartisan commission but republicans sabotaged it from get-go so now have they forfeited the right to complain about this one that the select one that they re trying to come up with? i think they re going to complain. the interesting twist on this i saw were nancy pelosi was actually thinking about appointing a republican to the
stable. we have people standing upstairs that need to be evacuated. i see many people on the balconies. the building is gone. there is no elevators. there is nothing. i mean, it almost resembles the trade center. there you go. rescue teams looking for clues in the rubble to where the bedrooms might be assuming that residents would have been sleeping at the time of that collapse. they re looking for carpet since the bedrooms were carpeted. they are also finding personal items in that rubble. i was talking to one of the first responders and they found a birthday card. nobody is going to let that get lost. in the midst of this tragedy, the questions are more and more urgent tonight. what caused this? who is responsible? who is in charge. the mayor of miami-dade county would support the opening of a grand jury invest st vgages inte
wow. wow. that s a big assessment. that is a big assessment. very big. that $948 plus the $850 a month in maintenance, i had no mortgage but i told this guy this is like having a mortgage. yeah, it is. for some people in america as you know that s like having a number of different mortgages. a couple different mortgages. let me ask you, so the garage in the building is underground, right? yes. okay. now was there always standing water? was there always water in the garage from the time you were there or something that was recent? i would say the last ten or 12 years i always noticed there was water. i was telling somebody that there was big fans from like years ago that you haven t seen were going 24 hours a day. i assume it was to have the place dried, but that was going on for a long time. i mean, i parked my car and half the time i came down it was always wet. there were pipes leaking. the ceiling was leaking.