SURFSIDE, Fla. — The demolition of the rest of the Surfside condo tower that partially collapsed nearly two weeks ago seems to be helping rescue workers uncover more deceased victims in the original rubble, with officials reporting Tuesday that eight more bodies have been found.
The death toll is now at 36, including 12 found since Sunday night’s demolition — the result of greater access to formerly unreachable layers beneath the concrete and steel debris, officials said.
Yet despite the measured progress in recovering the dead, 109 people are still unaccounted for since the partial collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo on June 24, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Tuesday afternoon at a news briefing.
And of those still missing, Levine Cava said there are “around 70 we can confirm were in the building at the time of collapse,” raising questions about dozens of other possible condo residents who are unaccounted for. She urged family members to contact the county about their possible whereabouts, noting that police detectives are trying to verify the names of the missing victims.
“I ask all of you around the world to please keep these victims in your hearts and prayers,” Levine Cava said at the news conference.
Soon after, for the first time, members of the news media were allowed a glimpse of the heap of tragedy, but from across the street on Collins Avenue. Wind gusts and a gray sky cast a pall over the broken concrete and steel twisted like spaghetti, rubble where a lobby and driveway should be.
The 30-foot pile from the controlled demolition obscured a persistent search and rescue operation closer to the beach, where cranes and other heavy machinery loomed over crews who have faced fires, squalls, and heat over 13 excruciating days since the collapse.
Plastic bins, black-and-white tile peeling off concrete, a black pillow, toilets, crushed shoes and shredded cloth pocked the demolished section. What appeared to be two blue and yellow elevator motors marked some of the only color in the ashen mound. Across the street, what looked like strips of flowery wallpaper lay on the sidewalk and grass.
With expectations of finding any survivors under the mountain of concrete debris fading, the mayor still tried to convey a sense of hope in the aftermath of Sunday night’s demolition of the other half of the 136-unit condo building facing Collins Avenue.
“When your loved ones are involved, we will spare nothing,” Levine Cava said.
She said families missing loved ones are bracing for bad news, and have been for over a week. They will be ready for the next phase when it comes, she said.
So far, she said, 29 of the 36 condo residents found dead have been identified.
“The whole world wants to know what happened here,” she said, noting that 5 million tons of debris from the collapsed building are being sorted and placed in a county warehouse while homicide detectives conduct a criminal investigation amid a planned grand jury probe. “I look forward to learning the truth, as do we all. But I think it will be awhile until everything is understood.”
The demolition of the standing half of Champlain Towers South on Sunday evening seems to have accelerated the pace of recovering more deceased victims. On Monday, county officials announced that four more bodies had been discovered since the implosion, raising the death toll to 28. So, with Tuesday’s grim progress of eight more bodies found in the rubble, one-third of the official death toll has been accounted for in the past two days.
“The demo (of the remaining building) made a significant impact in regards to allowing us to search those grids that we just weren’t able to earlier,” said Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky. “We’re aggressively de-layering those areas and searching throughout.”
Better access to the original site of the collapse — without the potential threat of the standing part of the building toppling over on rescue workers — has been a critical factor in the search effort, he said.
“We’re primarily focusing on those areas we had limited access to from the beginning,” he said. “With that hazard being removed, it was a huge relief definitely for myself as chief.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who toured the Surfside site Monday, said rescuers are now searching what “happened to be where a lot of master bedroom areas were. Likely a lot of people who were sleeping at that time, unfortunately.”
The building’s collapse occurred at about 1:20 a.m. on June 24 while almost all of the residents were sleeping. The structural failure initially began in the pool deck and garage areas, which engineers believe triggered the collapse of the midsection of the tower and then the front part facing the ocean. Fifty-five of the 136 condo units were destroyed.
Earlier Tuesday, Cominsky acknowledged that finding any survivors at this point was not likely.
“Unfortunately, we are not seeing anything positive,” Cominsky said.
Asked whether rescue workers’ efforts will soon turn from search-and-rescue to recovery, Cominsky paused a few seconds before answering. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’re actively looking into and having different dialogues in regards to our strategies moving forward.”
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said he has continued to meet with families, including the family of a young woman who recently graduated from law school and was married in January.
“Obviously, the family was distraught and wanting to know whether or not their daughter and son-in-law are going to be found,” he said.
Burkett urged the county to allow families to return to the rubble per their request. He said the families should see the “amazing efforts being expended on their behalf.”
He said the town has been responding to inquiries from large buildings in Surfside and advising them to do a full structural review of their buildings. The town is also doing a “deep dive” into the sister building north of Champlain Towers South.
“We have deep concerns about that building,” he said.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is leading a federal investigation, has tagged evidence coming from the pile of debris and conducted Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, imaging.
Through NIST there will be periodic updates, Levine Cava said, but it is still early to cite the causes of the collapse. NIST, structural specialists and rescue crews are working on site to tag evidence and capture possible insights from the debris.
The National Science Foundation is also sending staff to better analyze the debris with special scanners.
“All this evidence will be critical to the eventual fact-finding report,” Levine Cava said. “We are going to be making policy changes at every level and at every step in the building process to ensure that this can never, ever happen again.”
Meanwhile, the storm named Elsa, which was among the factors in accelerating the demolition of the condo tower Sunday, passed through the Florida Keys and headed toward the Tampa area and northern Florida. The storm’s gusty winds nonetheless affected some of the condo rescue operations in Surfside.
Winds were affecting the use of cranes in the search effort, while lightning stopped rescue workers around 1 a.m. Monday for about a half hour.
After a night of wind and rain brought by Elsa, the makeshift memorial a block away on Harding Avenue started to sag with soggy flowers and runny pieces of paper.
A small box of items collected from the rubble jutted out into the walkway: a pair of headphones, a glasses case, a stuffed dog. A Bible sitting on the box was turned to Psalm 91, a psalm of protection.
The wind blew over glass prayer candles, and shards tumbled onto the sidewalk.
Town of Surfside workers in neon vests swept the debris into the trash, creating a melancholy potpourri of flower petals and once-legible messages of hope.
Leo Soto, 26, brought boxes of flowers donated by Galleria Farms and handed out small bouquets for passersby to stick into the fence. He felt compelled to freshen up the memorial, which he says he helped start days ago, at first in memory of friends Nicole Langesfeld and Luis Sadovinic.
He said when he arrived Tuesday, he was “really sad” to see the soggy sight.
“I was like, is it going to end like this?” he said. “This background of dying flowers?”
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