Between The Headlines: Florida Condo Collapse
2 July 2021
Portion of Multi-Story Condo Building Collapses in Florida
What happened?
In the middle of the night on 24 June, the Champlain Towers South Condo building near Miami partially collapsed with no advance warning or evacuation of its residents. The disaster was captured on video.
Previous inspections, mandated for older buildings by regulation, uncovered structural deficiencies and water and salt damage in the building and outlined necessary repairs at least two and a half years before the collapse. The condo’s owners association knew this but failed to fix the problems.
As of the time of writing, 22 people are determined to have died and 126 people are still unaccounted for. Rescue efforts are ongoing.
How was it covered?
Center/Least bias: USA Today. Associated Press.
Right bias: New York Post. Fox News.
Left bias: NPR. New York Times.
What related misinformation circulated?
A short time after reports of the collapse were published, some followers of the QAnon set of conspiracy theories began to speculate that the building’s destruction was part of efforts by their heroes against child sex trafficking (h/t @dappergander via Twitter). The existence of tunnels, which in the QAnon imagination are frequently connected with the illicit movement of children, underneath the structure may have contributed to this connection being alleged.
QAnon influencer DeAnna Lorraine asserts that the condo disaster was "a deep state operation" and that "someone important was in the building that they didn't want there" (h/t @RightWingWatch via Twitter). This theory seems to run counter to the above, where the white hats supposedly collapsed the building to save children.
John McAfee’s death the day before the collapse, and a real post of a simple letter “Q” to his Instagram shortly after, prompted the QAnon community to also link McAfee to the disaster. Someone took this as an opportunity to insert a fake tweet purportedly from McAfee on 8 June, saying he had large stores of data located on hard drives in a condo he owned in the collapsed building. However, McAfee never sent that tweet, and an Associated Press review confirmed that there was no record of McAfee or his wife ever owning a condo at that address.
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