But even in the middle of the night, a handful of people dotted the sidewalks near the building. And, on the mostly deserted sand that separated the tower from the sea, a lone fisherman, Dino Buisine, was in his beach chair fishing for crevalle jack, his pole tucked into a PVC pipe in the sand.
“I heard a big ggggrrrh and then see this big ball of dust in the air,” said Buisine, a local landscaper who remembers when the Champlain went up in 1981. “I heard the boom and it looked like dominoes: First one part came down, then the part behind it. I could hear screaming from people on the other side, the side that was still standing. They were on their balconies, screaming, because the elevators didn’t work.”
Buisine knew not to move toward the rubble: “I did demolition and construction in the Army and they teach you to move away from things like that.” He packed up his stuff, including the jacks he’d caught, and went home to Miami.
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