Surfside Sparks Memories of Harbour Cay Condo Collapse

Forty years plays tricks on the memory, even if you’re someone who covered a condo collapse 200 miles up the road in 1981, the very year Champlain Towers South opened in Surfside.

One constant is that we in South Florida rely on engineering.

Back then, as it still does today, engineering served to dredge our canals, create air conditioning, propel jet travel, aid in mosquito control and inform the dwellings in which we live. And it’s become even more important as we continue to struggle with global warming, sea-level rise and infrastructure decay – issues far more critical now than in 1981. This column, for better or worse, is more about the human side of my particular memory of that long-ago weekend when I covered the Harbour Cay Condominium collapse.

Exhuming recollections was complicated, coaxed back in almost hallucinatory bursts through old archives and memories – the human anthill of round-the-clock recovery, the white construction helmets gleaming under spotlights and black sky, the grinding machines, two 100-foot-high cranes from NASA right up the road joining equipment from Patrick Air Force Base, the surreal landscape of rubble, black coffee in the night chill, families keeping vigil in a nearby condo office, struggling to reconcile loss with faith.

At 2:45 p.m. on Friday, March 27, 1981, I was putting the Saturday real estate section to bed at the Florida Today newspaper, then called simply Today. The lead story, with my byline and headline: “‘Persian’ condo coming up.” It was called Xanadu and, at 15 stories, set to be the tallest structure in Cocoa Beach.

Towne Realty of Milwaukee was the developer of Xanadu and about 10 other properties, including the five-story Harbour Cay across the road, which got incidental mention in my story as part of a list. The public face of the development was a Cocoa Beach family company called Univel Inc., contracted to do the construction but portrayed – wrongly, as it happened – as its developer.

As I was sending the section to production, workers were pouring in concrete for Harbour Cay’s roof slab, looking forward to the “topping-off” party that evening.

At that very moment, in a condo near the beach, Carolyn Nowakowski, mother of six, was writing “Woman in Crisis,” a piece on for her church discussion group, while her husband, Con, was running his insurance agency on Merritt Island. Carolyn and Con loved to read, keep up with events and travel, and were woven into the business and social community. Faith was their anchor.

Carolyn was typing: “For years we have been told that Satan was going to attack our families and when I would consider that prospect, I felt that a strong Christian family would be annoyed, but not devastated.”

Midway through typing the word “devastated,” she heard what she called an “awful rumble.”

She dashed out and saw Harbour Cay collapse in a thick cloud of yellow smoke and called the police.

In five seconds, amid screams and yells, the fifth floor buckled, gave way and pancaked onto the fourth, third, second and first, crushing and tangling workers in rebar and concrete. Eleven were killed and 23 injured. Carolyn’s eldest son, Darrell, was one of the dead.

She did not know he was inside or that he was working there. He was on his second day as a glazier, setting glass into storm doors. She ran in terror toward the ruins. One of Darrell’s friends told her he was inside.

Darrell Nowakowski was 22, and 6′ 6″ like his dad. He was a mechanical and electronics whiz who could fix just about anything. He’d recently obtained his First-Class radio license and had hooked a battery up in his red van to watch TV and enjoy his stereo.

As the sirens blared outside and police radios urgently crackled, the city desk turned up its own police radio and scrambled to form a game plan and assignments.

It was too late to send my section back. I was four years in at the paper, turning 30 yet way greener than I thought, and restless to go to a bigger town like, say, Miami. The big-city media would see the Xanadu spread in all its soft-soap glory. I swallowed the vanity. People were dead, injured, anguished and soon to mourn. There was work to do, my attitude toward publicity and spin would never be quite the same, and it was time to suck it up and pitch in.

I stayed on call through the weekend, and was on duty at the site Saturday night. Sunday afternoon, crews had recovered the last body. It was Darrell. His brothers, ages 7 and 11, were at a ball game. I alone was with Carolyn and Con, in an air-conditioned condo office across the street, uneasy as a journalist-intruder in their unfathomable grief – yet staying put.

Con, lean, bespectacled and pensive, picked up the phone to deliver the news to his sons, back from the game.

“He’s gone now, but he’s very much alive where he is,” Con said in a low voice. “We’ll get in later and we’ll talk about school, OK?”

I kept my composure until an involuntary shiver started to hit me while driving back to the newsroom. I turned into a shopping mall lot, pulled up the windows, and let out an involuntary howl of grief.

I composed myself, returning to write the story: “Search for bodies ends: 11th victim found in condo’s rubble.”

I finished the story well past midnight, red-eyed and jacked up on coffee, ready to go back to the site. The managing editor wisely told me to go home and sleep. I slept like the dead until, at 3 p.m., a neighbor banged on my apartment door, shouting: “Reagan’s been shot!”

News does not stop.