The recovery effort at Champlain Towers South may be coming to a close, three weeks to the day after the building collapsed.
Miami-Dade Police identified four more victims Thursday. The death toll now stands at 97, with 90 bodies identified and 90 families notified, said Alvaro Zabaleta, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade Police.
Zabaleta said the department only had 97 open missing persons reports, although he cautioned it didn’t mean the recovery effort was over.
“The numbers line up but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re done. We don’t know. That’s why we can’t claim victory yet. On an incident like this it is very rare to get 100%,” he said. “Until we pick up every piece of rubble and clear it, we can’t say we’re done.”
The police department’s tally differs slightly from a statement released Wednesday evening by Miami-Dade County, which said that 90 bodies of the 97 recovered had been identified and that there were 8 outstanding missing persons reports. The county did not immediately clarify the disparity in the numbers.
Zabaleta said the recovery effort isn’t officially concluded yet and he wasn’t sure when it would be.
“We really haven’t put a timeline to it, but we know we’re making progress. At this point it’s still a 24-hour process,” he said. “We’re just going to continue until we’re done, done.”
There are at least seven more bodies to be identified, a process that relies on DNA matching. Four new victims were identified Thursday, including Maria Notkin, 81, Michelle Anna Pazos, 23, and Mihai Radulescu, 82, who were recovered on Friday. Valeria Barth, 14, was recovered Sunday.
Barth and her parents, Luis Fernando and Catalina, traveled to Surfside from Colombia to see family and get vaccinated against COVID-19. Notkin, a retired paralegal and banker, lived in unit 302 with her husband, a retired physical education teacher in Miami Beach.
_____
