Securitas Settles Surfside Condo Collapse Case for $517M
The plaintiffs alleged that the Securitas security officer on duty didn’t activate the building-wide in-unit mass notification system prior to the collapse.
Image via Adobe by zimmytws
Miami, Florida – A settlement worth more than $1 billion was announced last month as part of class action lawsuit over the collapse of Champlain Towers South of Miami’s Surfside condos.
The tragedy, which took place on June 24, 2021, killed 98 people when the oceanfront tower condominium partially collapsed in the middle of the night.
The settlement will be split among more than two dozen defendants who were sued on charges of negligence, wrongful death, and personal injury related to the collapse of the condo. Securitas Security Services, which provided guard services to the property, will be responsible for paying nearly half of the total settlement.
According to the lawsuit, the security officer on duty during the night of the event called 911 about 10 minutes before the collapse but didn’t activate the building-wide in-unit voice alarm.
In a deposition to Champlain victims’ lawyers, a Securitas manager said the company hadn’t trained all its guards on how to use the system to alert residents to evacuate and it was not activated the night of the collapse, according to the Miami Herald.
There were many lessons about mass notification systems and security officer training to be learned from the Surfside tragedy, and those lessons were outlined in an article previously published by Campus Safety. Read it here.
You can view a full list of the defendants that will be contributing to the settlement, here.
This article originally was published in CS sister publication, Security Sales & Integration. Steve Karantzoulidis is SSI’s web editor.
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