No cover, no buyers: the insurance gap that stopped a $1.6bn Surfside tower in its tracks
Source: https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/, June 23, 2026
By: Matthew Sellers
Five years ago this week, Champlain Towers South fell in the pre-dawn darkness of a South Florida Tuesday, killing 98 people in seconds and triggering the third-deadliest non-deliberate structural failure in U.S. history, behind the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City and the 1866 Pemberton Mill collapse in Massachusetts. The $1.02 billion insurance settlement that followed — paid by the carriers of 31 defendants, from engineering firms to a neighbouring developer’s security contractor — rewrote how the industry thinks about construction risk in Florida. Today, on that same Surfside beachfront, a new chapter is unfolding that may prove equally instructive. Read more.
