During Surfside Condo Collapse, Miami-Dade Employee Mistakenly Deleted Audio Files: Report

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, FL — During the first hours of the search-and-rescue efforts at the site of the June 24 collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, a Miami-Dade County worker deleted key audio files, according to a USA Today investigation.

Twenty-three hours of recordings, including Miami-Dade Fire Rescue team communications with dispatchers as they searched for survivors, were erased, despite a July 1 court order to preserve all recordings and documents from the condo collapse that killed 98 people.

According to Miami-Dade Fire officials, the unnamed employee was directed to archive the audio files and was reprimanded after deleting them, USA Today reported.

As the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Miami-Dade police and other investigators work to establish the cause of the collapse, they rely on these audio files and documents from the emergency response at the site.

A former FEMA director told the news outlet that documented search-and-rescue efforts are most important in the first 24 hours.

“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,” Craig 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.”

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue told CBS Miami that the deletion of the files was an accident and that they were later recovered through a third party.

“Miami-Dade County keeps records twice as long as required by state law. In an effort to back up the records permanently, an employee made a miscalculation in the timeframe the audio was available for retention, and ultimately failed to properly retain it during that period of time. No Miami-Dade County employee deliberately deleted any audio. The audio was unfortunately purged by the system after a certain time and not by an employee. The audio was later obtained through a third-party service (Broadcastify),” Erika Benitez, a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue spokesperson, said in a statement.