Officials from the city of Surfside will be in court Wednesday in attempt to get a forensic engineer access to the site of the June 24th condo collapse that killed 98 people.
Mayor Charles Burkett said the city will ask a judge to allow Allyn Kilsheimer onto the site of Champlain Towers South. Some city commissioners say he needs to be able to investigate not only diagnose what happened but gain knowledge about the safety of other buildings in the area.
The city says they’re not being given access because the site has been deemed a crime scene, and Miami-Dade County has become the lead investigative agency. Kilsheimer says he’s looked at nine buildings in the area since the collapse and two buildings took immediate action.
He feels his hands are tied until he can gain complete access to the site.
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“It’s incredibly slow and I’m not able to investigate things the way I need to investigate them,” he said. “Until you can do all of this material sampling, there’s no way to really know. You know what the end result was, but that’s all you know.”
Kilsheimer estimates the cost of his investigation at $2.1 million.
