ESCAPE FROM THE TOWER OF TERROR!

What happened when Florida condo collapsed

WHEN half of the 12-story Champlain Towers South Condo building collapsed like a pancake in a matter of seconds, 88-year-old Esther Gorfinkel was one of the lucky who made it out alive.

Esther, who’d lived on the fifth floor in the Surfside, Fla., luxury residence since it was built in 1981, had felt a shaking shortly after 1 a.m. on June 24, but chalked it up to bad weather thundering in from the ocean in the back — until an announcement warned over an intercom, in English and then in Spanish — to get out now!

The first emergency exit she reached was mangled shut so she rushed to another and found herself with about 15 others clambering down the stairs.

Luckily, they weren’t in the section where about 70 of 136 units — some with price tags as high as $1 million — crumpled to the ground in about 11 seconds, forming a mound of concrete and steel debris more than 30 feet high.

Esther and her group of survivors splashed through a pool of water and debris in the lower garage and reached the beach.

Staring through the huge billowing smoke and ash plume that had been the 120-plus-feet building moments before: “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” she says.

They were lucky.