Collapse: Disaster in Surfside · Treefort Media & Miami Herald

The Lives Lived and Lost

May 25, 2022·48 min·3 clips

Halfway to the collapse site, Pablo Rodriguez watches a video on his phone and sees his mother's apartment completely crash down — 'at that moment, it's really the moment that I was watching them die.'

The episode begins with a warning. Graphic audio and painful themes set up a story about how journalists can honor people without flattening them into a count. Joan Crisos gives the frame. After more than 35 years at the Miami Herald, her work shifted on June 24th from health and education to the missing and the dead. She calls the work forensic. The word echoes the investigation into Champlain Towers South, but here it means going apartment by apartment, life by life, with care. Crisos says the people who lived there deserved the same close attention as the structural failure. Then Stella enters the story. The episode follows the obituary of Stella Catarossi's family, including her mother, grandparents, and aunt, with her father left as the only surviving close relative. His grief stays partly shielded. The firefighter father asked the Herald and other media outlets not to identify him, even as his vigil became public record. He waited at the site. Stella and her mother were recovered together on July 2nd, after seven days and eight nights of him being there. The scene nearly goes quiet. Broward County Battalion Chief Nicole Naughty, working 16-hour shifts with her dog Dig, describes equipment stopping across the pile. More than 200 emergency workers paused. No concrete moved. No metal sounded. The footsteps of those carrying Stella away became the memory Naughty said would stay with her forever. The episode then turns journalism into testimony. Crisos reads from Alex Harris's story about Naughty, and the sentence holds trauma, search work, and public mourning at once. The credits land with that weight still in the room.

As heard by us

A careful, grief-heavy Surfside episode that keeps the dead and missing at the center.

"Collapse: Disaster in Surfside" moves past the collapse itself and stays with the people inside Champlain Towers South. Joan Crisos and Alex Harris thread names, apartments, and family ties through the reporting, which keeps the disaster anchored in private loss instead of…

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Why you'd press play

Hear the Surfside collapse as a human story, not just an инженер? No, keep ASCII. Hear the Surfside collapse as a human story, not just a disaster.

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