Andy Slater
- At least 96 people died when Champlain Towers South collapsed on June 24.
- The condo building in Surfside, Florida, had known issues with flooding and cracked cement.
- The collapse devastated the community and left many unanswered questions.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Emergency dispatchers began receiving calls about an explosion just nine minutes before a condo building outside Miami had completely collapsed, the Miami Herald reported Wednesday.
The first 911 call came at 1:16 a.m. Then a flood began. So did the confusion.
"Holy s–t. We gotta get outta here. Hurry up. Hurry up. There's a big explosion," one caller said, unable to describe what was going on. "I don't know, there's a lot of smoke going in, I can't see right now. Gotta get out of here. Gotta get outta here."
By 1:25 a.m., the 12-story Champlain Towers South had collapsed, killing at least 96 people. At that point, the Herald reported, callers reported scenes of panic and screams from within the destroyed building.
"There are people in the rubble, yelling," one caller said, shouts of "help" audible in the background. "They are screaming they are stuck," he said.
The release of the calls by Miami-Dade police comes a day after it was revealed the condo building had required "concrete structural repair" back in 1996, just 15 years after it had been constructed.
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