Based on my experience on an HOA board, my guess is that the minutes are far more likely to have survived than a list of residents as they are more widely distributed.
Someone will have a copy in their email.
Heck, I could probably find a copy of the minutes where my HOA discussed the slab/rebar/potential buildings collapse situation, and that was nearly a decade ago.
The bigger issue will be how detailed the minutes are. At a minimum it’s probably provable that the board saw the engineers report. Why they weren’t acting on it may be fuzzier to ascertain.
Excerpt:
The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.
They go on to note that it will be very expensive, but the actual cost estimate is not part of the document meep linked. (It claims an estimate is attached, but it doesn’t appear to be.)
There is discussion of the membrane which is the precise issue my condo was dealing with. And as I noted, that had a $15 million price tag and was a smaller square footage.
Yikes! Good thing your condo decided to deal with it. I’m glad you aren’t among the missing!
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Yeah, me too!
It was expensive though. I moved out before the work commenced, but I think by the time they restored the exterior common spaces the tab was in the vicinity of $17 million, which comes to over $100,000 per unit.
So cost could well have been delaying the start of the work if they were trying to raise enough funds to pay for it.
I see “$9 million in repairs needed” and think “So what?”, especially in a low-interest-rate environment.
When I was on a co-op board in Queens, we had to oversee a similar $$ project on our own buildings. That doesn’t necessarily sound like a lot of money to me, especially spread out over a few hundred owners.
So I learned there’s a Wiki list of building/structure collapses
New (to me) info provides smoking gun.
A woman, among those missing from the Champlain Towers South collapse, was on the phone with her husband moments after an outdoor swimming pool caved and then the line went dead.
So perhaps the pool went first, and the collapse triggered the building collapse. From some of the links above, the pool was identified as a problem area in the earlier inspections.
That’s roughly $70,000 per unit if nothing comes from reserves. If some significant portion of the owners can’t secure financing to cover the assessment, that’ll cause problems.
I was on the board of my HOA up until I moved and I know they had worked with a lender to secure financing for the assessment to cover the work on our slab. The issue was with owners who had little or even negative equity with which to secure a loan. The building could cover 1 or 2 owners with reserves but not 10 or 12.
Also, my building was able to pay for over half the cost from reserves, so our assessment was much lower even though our per-unit cost was in the vicinity of $100,000.
It’s pretty different when it’s everybody’s main abode, and when it’s people’s vacation homes.
People will cover maintenance on the place they live most of the time. They will not if it’s their fun beach getaway.
Eh, my guess is that the resident-owners may have been a bigger problem than the vacation-home-owners. On average the vacation-home folks are probably wealthier to begin with and probably have higher equity and a bigger capacity to absorb and/or secure financing for a special assessment.
Heck, when my condo had a special assessment of $5,000 for a new roof they had to offer financing for owners.
Miami-Area Condo Board President Warned of Need for Repairs in April Letter - WSJ
The WSJ seems to have gotten a copy of a letter the president of the condo association wrote in April urging approval of a $15M assessment to fix major damage.
I wonder if she survived the collapse. 
So they weren’t ignoring the need for work; they were working on paying for it, which was my speculation.
I’m trying to think how long the gap was from when we first became aware of the issue until the work commenced. I don’t think it was 3 years, but it was certainly more than 1.
Had the building in Miami not collapsed, it’s not clear exactly when the work would have started, but probably not materially sooner than November 2021, and I believe the engineer’s report was from November 2018.
So they were a bit slow to act. And their problem was worse than ours in that our rebar was still mostly fine but due to the failed membrane was being exposed to water when it shouldn’t have been. I distinctly recall the HOA President asking the Building Committee Chairperson if the building was in danger of collapsing soon and she responded that it was her understanding that we were looking at years, not weeks or months. Sounds like they were looking at weeks or months and acting as though they had years. 
Still, $15 million divided 130 ways is $115,000 per unit. That’s a freaking big deal.
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I looked up some of the addresses on Zillow. (8777 Collins Ave if you care to do likewise)
Looks like the units ranged from $200K to over $2 million with $500K-$600K being around the median. So upper-middle class, but mostly not uber-wealthy. The kind of people who don’t have an extra $115,000 laying around collecting dust, but who ought to understand the concept of taking care of things.
And a range of sizes means that the assessment wouldn’t have been uniform: some owners would have to pay more and some less. But it would’ve been a lot regardless.
I’m curious from a P&C perspective… who ultimately pays all the claims?
I assume the average owner will get compensated for the full amount they had insured, but will the insurers go after anyone? Who? I assume the board members aren’t personally liable. And if every insurer sues the HOA then it’s a zero-sum game.
Can they go after the contractor who did incorrect work in the first place? Place was built in 1981.
From the engineer’s report:
Since the reinforced concrete slab is not sloped to drain, the water sits on the surface until it evaporates. This is a major error in the development of the original contract documents…
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I read somewhere that Florida has a statue of limitations for construction defects and this building is long past that, so i don’t believe anyone can sue the builder or the engineering firms that designed it.
I assume the estates of homeowners will be paid for total loss of the property, to their policy limits. And presumably life insurance will be paid, sooner if the deceased’s DNA is uncovered than if not. I know there’s a suit already filed, but i doubt there much for anyone to gain via suits.
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In one of the live updates, I saw it ranged from $80-336K. 80k is a lot on a 200k unit 
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I assume that the owners themselves will be paid as well… the ones that survived, which is non-trivial.
I assume that non-resident owners would have insurance that would cover whatever liability they have with their tenants?
Like a renter’s possessions should be covered by renter’s insurance, but if they sue the owner then if the owner has the proper kind of liability insurance that will cover their liability to the tenants?
Would a tenant’s renter’s insurance company subrogate to the owner’s insurance company? Just curious if there’s some notion that the owners are liable since their HOA did not properly maintain the building.
Okay, it’s not -all- the theories (aliens! bombs!), but all the reasonable theories: