ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – Rescue crews in Orange County responded to an apartment complex off Sand Lake Road early Thursday morning after a woman called 911 and said she was trapped inside her apartment and afraid it could collapse.
As more than 350 people who live at The Rialto wait a second day to find out when — and if — they will be able to return home, the woman who first called 911 is sharing her story with News 6.
“I woke up with the feeling that something was wrong, and I sat up in bed and was just listening to all of this popping and cracking,” she said. “It was like settling noises that I could hear coming from our bedroom wall, around the windows, the ceiling, the bathroom. It paranoid me to the point that I sat up in bed and started crying.”
The woman, who did not want to show her face on camera, spoke to our News 6 crew when she returned to the building Friday morning in an effort to retrieve more personal belongings left behind. Like many of her neighbors, she stayed at a hotel with her husband last night because the building has been deemed unsafe by county officials until it’s evaluated by engineers.
[BELOW: Orange County apartment building evacuated because of ‘structural instability’]
She said when she woke up in a panic before 5 a.m., her husband encouraged her to go outside on the patio and get some fresh air. That’s when she discovered that the doors wouldn’t open.
“We couldn’t get out,” she said. “At that point, you don’t know, like, ‘OK, do I have minutes? Do I have, you know, a day?’ So you’re in a panic.”
The couple grabbed their cats and called 911.
“In that moment, we thought we were going to die,” she said. “We ended up busting out the screen to our window to crawl out through the window onto the patio and scream for help, trying to get the emergency crews to find us, and they finally arrived after what felt like forever.”
She said the firefighters first thought the lock was broken.
“It’s not. We can’t open our door because the weight of the building is coming down and compressing our doors,” she said. “I’m screaming at them to break the door down.”
[BELOW: Orange County officials hold news conference after apartment building evacuation]
When first responders pried the door open to get them out, the couple ran down the hallway.
“Everyone was just staring at us like I was just a hysterical woman,” she said. “My husband and I ran for our lives.”
She told our News 6 crew that she felt the urgency immediately. When Orange County Fire Rescue began receiving additional calls from other units where the doors wouldn’t open, and saw signs of “structural instability,” they made the decision to evacuate the entire building.
“We walked the building with Fire,” said Gilbert Mercado with the Orange County Division of Building Safety. “We saw obvious signs of fresh cracking on there, through the drywall on the first floor. It got progressively worse as we went up.”
Friday, the woman who called 911 shared new videos from her security camera that show first responders documenting some of the damage.
Orange County shared more than 100 pictures from inside and around The Rialto. Many include obvious signs of cracks.
The Division of Building Safety directed the property’s management to hire an engineer to evaluate the structure and find out how this happened, and if it is safe to occupy.
Some residents, including the woman who called 911, returned to the building Friday morning with the hopes of being escorted inside to retrieve more clothes or additional items. They told us they were turned away.
“It’s difficult,” one man told News 6. “We had ten minutes to get out, and our only instruction from Rialto was contact your insurance company.”
News 6 reached out to Northland, a real estate firm based out of state that owns The Rialto, to ask for additional information on the work engineers are doing, the cracks that have been documented, and what additional assistance is available for residents. A spokesperson told us that they are working on a response to our inquiry.
“It’s devastating,” said the woman who called 911. “And we feel like we’ve, like, lost our home, and we don’t know what to do.”
Orange County provided the following information about hotel accommodations:
Several hotels in the area are offering discounted rates to displaced residents including Rosen Hotels & Resorts (Rosen Inn, Rosen Plaza, Rosen Centre and Rosen Shingle Creek), Doubletree Theme Park Resort, and Courtyard by Marriott (across from Universal Orlando).
Displaced residents must request the special rates by mentioning The Rialto apartment evacuation.
For residents looking for additional information or assistance with hotel accommodations, please call Rialto Property Management at 407-630-8718, option #2.