Miami’s top prosecutor has pledged to have a grand jury examine the collapse of an oceanfront apartment building.

Even as the search continues for survivors, the focus was quickly shifting to accountability for a disaster likely to go down as one of the country’s worst.

The announcement by Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle did not address whether criminal charges could be filed, as they have been in other mass-casualty events that were found to be a result of negligence or incompetence.

While Ms Fernandez Rundle raised the prospect of “potential criminal investigations”, she said the grand jury inquiry would be used to determine “what steps we can take to safeguard our residents”.

“This is a matter of extreme public importance, and as the State Attorney elected to keep this community safe, I will not wait,” she said in a statement.

The announcement was the clearest signal to date that nearly a week after the building fell, leaving at least 12 people dead and 149 missing, the hunt for answers has begun.

The crumbling of the 12-storey Champlain Towers South in the coastal town of Surfside has baffled experts, who have identified clues but offered few theories to explain the building’s abrupt cave-in.

Questions as to what brought the condominium down, who is to blame and whether other buildings are vulnerable will now be the subject of numerous investigations.

The inquiries include federal, local and privately-led efforts, and each involves extraordinary complexity, with an array of factors such as the design of the building and the ocean’s tides on the night of the disaster under review. The most critical evidence is embedded in an avalanche of pulverised debris.

Experts say it will take months for the rubble to be cleared so the site and materials can be properly studied, and it may be years before investigators can offer definitive conclusions.

“Anyone who gets you an answer now can’t possibly have all the data to do a complete analysis,” said Allyn Kilsheimer, an engineer who has been contracted by Surfside to study what happened.

Mr Kilsheimer, who has consulted on major disasters including the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and the Florida International University bridge collapse that killed six in 2018, said in most disasters that were not deliberate, “you get to the end, and you probably don’t have one cause, you have maybe a series of things”.

But as he prepared for his first chance to inspect the site where rescuers are still combing through rubble, he said in an interview he was confident those causes could be unearthed, eventually. “Buildings talk to you, if you know how to listen to them,” he said.

Disasters and other mass-casualty events – including shooting rampages and terrorist attacks – often lead to a tangle of overlapping, expansive investigations into what happened, what mistakes might have occurred and what lessons can be learned.

However, unlike plane crashes or major acts of violence, there is no federal agency poised to step in and investigate in the exceedingly rare event that a building crumbles for no apparent reason.

In Surfside, a federal probe could soon follow the local effort to understand how the collapse happened.

With half-a-dozen experts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) already on the ground to conduct a preliminary inquiry, a decision about a full-scale investigation could come within the next several weeks, said Jennifer Huergo, a spokeswoman for the institute.

If it goes ahead, the aim of any inquiry by the somewhat obscure agency – which employs thousands of chemists, physicists and engineers, some of whom have Nobel Prizes to their names – will be highly specific: to discern “the technical cause of the collapse and, if indicated, to recommend changes to building codes, standards and practices, or other appropriate actions to improve the structural safety of buildings”, Ms Huergo wrote in an email. 

Previous reviews have led to changes in laws or building codes, though the NIST cannot require that any be adopted. (© The Washington Post)

© Washington Post