Compensation For Victims In Surfside Condo Collapse Nowhere Near Enough To Cover Tragic Loss

Via America’s Lawyer: New filings show there is not enough to go around when it comes to compensating those who lost everything in the Surfside condo collapse. Attorney Rachael Gilmer who is working this case joins Mike Papantonio to explain the Justice Department’s history of keeping tabs on members of the U.S. media, plus a list exceptions to the new rule.

Learn more about what happened and getting compensation for Florida's Surfside condo collapse at

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

New filings show there's not enough to go around when it comes to compensating those people who've lost everything in the Surfside condo collapse. I want to welcome attorney Rachael Gilmer who's following this case, as a matter of fact, working on this, trying to help these people. What did the defendants know, Rachel? What did they know when this collapse took place? If we're to go back and look at the book, what is it?

I think that's just it. We don't know what they knew.

Okay.

Now there's multiple different defendants and different defendants may have had access to different information. The homeowners association board and the company that did the original inspection in 2018 had a lot of information, but they didn't have information that said the building is about to collapse. They had information that said you have major problems, major structural problems back in 2018. But by 2021, we see there really had been no major action on that report.

Well, what I'm wondering is it, it didn't shout out and say, hey, the buildings are going to collapse, but it talked about the fact that we have structural problems. We have rebar that's failing. We have concrete that's failing. What, what would those things be?

Well, and those are things that were visible to the naked eye. I mean, it wasn't even information or damage that a lay person couldn't see. It was very obvious that there were problems with this building. I mean, there's reports that a guy who was coming to look at doing a bid for repairs to the pool deck just days before the collapse, called back to his boss and said, this building has major issues that we can't even do the repair work. This has got a guy who's just coming to do a bid and not necessarily even an expert. So there's some things that were so obvious and yet no action had been taken.

How did local government do with this? I mean, surely, I mean, I understand there's something where they had to, they do a recertification, a re-inspection every 40 years, but in between, there are people that show up and they're supposed to look at it and they're supposed to say, you got this problem and that problem. Didn't, didn't a government inspector just look at this place and say, everything's good to go?

So we know that the inspector, the government inspector received a copy of the 2018 report by the engineering firm that said there were major structural damages and, and said, you're still good to go. There's allegations that the condo association said, we've got a plan in place to repair these damages. But when that still hadn't happened, three years later, there was no one from the government saying, what's going on? Why the delays, why has nothing been done yet? It was just kind of forgotten.

Well, do you think it's a, do you think it's a broad problem with these, these condos are all up and down that, that same area, I mean, they're all built around the same time, a lot of built with the same builder, same kind of materials, same subcontractors. What is your, that, isn't that one of the big problems we gotta be looking at?

I think it is absolutely. You know, and it's, I read some reports that said there may not be one specific cause, but kind of a multitude of things that built up over time that then ultimately led to the structural collapse.

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