A wing of a 12-storey beachfront apartment building collapsed in a town outside Miami early on Thursday morning, killing at least one person and trapping many residents in rubble and twisted metal. Scores of rescuers pulled survivors from the debris as a cloud of dust floated through the neighbourhood.
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett warned during a news conference that the building manager told him the tower was quite full of residents and the death toll could rise.
“The building is literally pancaked,” Burkett said. “That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me that we are going to be as successful as we wanted to be in finding people alive.”
Miami Dade Commissioner Sally Heyman told CNN that officials have yet to account for 51 people believed to be residents of the building, but cautioned that it was unclear whether any or all of them were inside at the time of its collapse.
Officials said 10 people were treated at the scene and two were brought to the hospital, one of whom died.
Governor Ron DeSantis said officials were “bracing for some bad news just given the destruction that we’re seeing”.
Miami Dade Fire Rescue Chief Ray Jadallah said their team responded to a report of a building collapse at about 1:30am local time [04:30 GMT]. Jadallah said the destruction affected 55 of the building’s 136 apartment units.
He said 35 people who were trapped in the building were rescued, including two who were pulled from under the rubble.
“Search and rescue efforts are still ongoing,” Jadallah said at a news conference outside the building. “We do have operations being conducted inside based on additional intel we are receiving.”
Renovations under way
Officials said although it appears that work was being done on the building’s roof, the cause of the collapse remains unknown.
Officials have urged people to report missing people by calling a number of a “unification centre” that has been set up.
Nicolas Fernandez was waiting for a word on close family friends who lived in the collapsed section of the building.
“Since it happened, I’ve been calling them nonstop, just trying to ring their cellphones as much as we can to help the rescue to see if they can hear the cellphones.”
The collapse left a number of apartments in the still-standing part of the building exposed. Television footage showed bunk beds, tables and chairs still left inside the damaged apartments. Air-conditioner units were hanging from some parts of the building, where wires now dangled.
Barry Cohen, 63, said he and his wife were asleep in the building when he first heard what he thought was a crack of lightning. The couple went onto their balcony, then opened the door to the building’s hallway to find “a pile of rubble and dust and smoke billowing around”.
“I couldn’t walk out past my doorway,” said Cohen, the former vice mayor of Surfside. “A gaping hole of rubble.”
He and his wife eventually made it to the basement and found rising water there. They returned upstairs, screamed for help and were eventually brought to safety by firefighters using a cherry picker.
Cohen said he raised concerns years ago about whether nearby construction might be causing damage to the building after seeing cracked pavers on the pool deck.
The collapse appeared to affect one leg of the L-shaped tower. Piles of rubble and debris surrounded the area just outside the building, and cars up to two blocks away were coated with a light layer of dust from the debris.
The seaside condo development was built in 1981 in the southeast corner of Surfside. It had a few two-bedroom units currently on the market, with asking prices of $600,000 to $700,000.
The neighbourhood has a mix of new and old apartments, houses, condominiums and hotels, with restaurants and stores serving an international combination of residents and tourists.
