Pedestrian walkway collapses outside Hallandale Beach office tower, crushing cars but sparing people

Traffic on Hallandale Beach Boulevard had barely moved late Thursday morning when driver Jamie Weinstein saw a slab of concrete give way.

“I was waiting and faced forward and as I looked straight ahead I saw the collapse,” he said. “I got out of my car to check if anyone was underneath and thankfully, no one was. I probably would’ve been under the piece when it was coming down.”

The elevated structure that suddenly dropped was a pedestrian walkway and overhang connecting an 11-story office and medical building to its parking garage at 1250 E. Hallandale Beach Blvd. The failure crushed two unoccupied cars and sent dust and debris across a busy stretch of roadway in this coastal Broward County city.

There were no injuries, but in a region still haunted by the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse, the partial failure at a 1970s concrete building drew swift emergency response and renewed questions about how safe South Florida’s aging commercial towers really are.

What happened

Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue said crews were dispatched just before 11 a.m. Thursday after reports of a structural collapse. When firefighters arrived, they found a section of the elevated connector between the main tower and the garage had dropped onto the driveway area below, trapping two vehicles.

“The walkway has collapsed. At this time, there are no reported injuries,” the Hallandale Beach Police Department said in a written statement.

Out of what police called “an abundance of caution,” fire rescue conducted a partial evacuation of the building while a city structural engineer and representatives of the building’s management surveyed the damage. Yellow tape cordoned off the collapse zone for hours as traffic backed up along the boulevard, which connects Interstate 95 to the barrier island.

By late afternoon, Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue said it was in the process of concluding and demobilizing its response. The cause of the failure remained under investigation Friday.

A 1970s tower with dozens of tenants

The 11-story property, known by its address, is a multi-tenant office and medical building constructed in the early 1970s. It sits on about 2.7 acres with an attached, roughly 400-space parking garage. Doctors’ offices, law and accounting firms and a fitness center are among the tenants.

“It’s definitely old,” said Ashley Tapplee, a sales director for a pharmaceutical company who works on the third floor. “This was bound to happen at some point, but you don’t expect it to. When you come to work, you expect to be safe… it was very scary.”

Tapplee said she was near a window when she saw the structure fall. She and other workers described frequent maintenance problems inside the building, including elevators that were often out of service.

Another employee, Kevin Uribe, said the sound of the collapse was startling.

“It was a boom — I thought it was lightning,” he said.

Ownership and response

Property records show the building was originally constructed in the early 1970s and changed hands several times before its current owner, Soliman Corporation, bought it in a deal that closed in March 2021. The Montreal-based commercial real estate firm paid $16.5 million for the site, according to transaction reports.

Soliman describes itself as a value-add investor, a common industry term for firms that buy older properties, make improvements and seek higher rents and returns. The company lists a U.S. office at the same Hallandale Beach address. A representative for Soliman did not respond to requests for comment about the collapse, the building’s maintenance history or recent inspections.

Why these structures can fail

The failed element is an exterior pedestrian connector and overhang, not a floor slab within the main tower. Structural engineers who have not examined the site said that, in general, elevated walkways and garage connectors in older coastal buildings are vulnerable to slow deterioration.

Exposed concrete can crack over time, allowing water and salt-laden air to reach the reinforcing steel inside. That steel can corrode and expand, leading to spalling and a loss of strength. Connections where a walkway ties into a tower or garage can be especially sensitive if they were not adequately protected or maintained.

“What you often see in these cases is years of water intrusion and corrosion that may show up as rust stains, cracking or sagging before anything catastrophic,” said one South Florida structural engineer, speaking generally about typical failure modes. “But without the drawings and a site visit, you can’t say exactly what happened here.”

City officials have not released engineering reports or inspection records related to the 1250 E. Hallandale Beach building. As of Friday, it was not publicly known when the structure last underwent its required safety recertification or whether any deficiencies were documented for the walkway, garage or connecting elements.

How inspections work — and what they don’t cover

Hallandale Beach, like other municipalities in Broward County, participates in a building safety inspection program that dates back years. Under that regime, most larger buildings must undergo structural and electrical recertification at 40 years of age and every 10 years thereafter. After the Surfside disaster, Hallandale Beach expanded oversight to cover all buildings 25 years and older, with reinspection every 10 years, at the discretion of the building official.

Owners are required to hire Florida-licensed engineers or architects to perform the inspections and submit reports to the city. If inspectors identify significant deterioration or unsafe conditions, local building officials can order repairs or even evacuations.

Those local rules operate alongside, but separate from, statewide reforms Florida enacted after the collapse of Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in Surfside that partially fell in June 2021, killing 98 people.

In 2022, lawmakers approved Senate Bill 4-D, which for the first time mandated periodic “milestone” structural inspections for condominium and cooperative buildings three stories or higher. Those inspections are required when a building reaches 30 years of age, or 25 years if it is within 3 miles of the coast, and every 10 years afterward. The law also requires condo associations to conduct structural reserve studies and to fund reserves for key safety-related components, changes intended to prevent the kind of long-delayed repairs investigators have cited in Surfside.

Lawmakers later passed Senate Bill 154 to adjust implementation timelines and clarify parts of the new regime.

Those statutes, however, apply to residential condos and co-ops, not to commercial office buildings such as the Hallandale Beach property. Oversight of older offices, garages and mixed-use towers remains largely in the hands of counties and cities.

What comes next

For workers like Tapplee, the distinctions in statute are less important than the lived experience of entering an older concrete building that has just seen part of its exterior structure fall away.

“You don’t think about this happening when you’re just going into work,” she said. “Now it’s in the back of everyone’s mind.”

Dozens of small businesses and medical practices use the Hallandale building as their base. Depending on how long parts of the complex remain closed or restricted, they could face lost appointments, reduced revenue and potential relocation costs. City officials have not said when full access might be restored.

Meanwhile, the incident adds to a growing list of structural scares across South Florida in recent years, from garages and pool decks to balconies and stairwells, many involving buildings built in the same era as Champlain Towers South.

Investigators will eventually document exactly why the Hallandale Beach walkway failed and whether warning signs were missed. The narrower question is what repairs are needed at 1250 E. Hallandale Beach Blvd. The larger one, for regulators and building owners across Florida, is whether the systems meant to catch problems in aging concrete structures are keeping up with the risks.

For Weinstein, the driver who watched the concrete come down in front of him, the near miss is still sinking in.

“I just saw it fall,” he said. “You realize how lucky it was that nobody was under there.”