Tearful families and sorrowing residents continued to adorn a makeshift chain-link fence memorial in Surfside on Saturday with photos, flowers, candles, toys and notes for those still missing nearly three days after a portion of the Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed early Thursday morning.
It echoed similar scenes from almost 20 years ago when people arrived by the droves to leave similar notes and mementos for those missing following the collapse of the twin towers in New York on 9/11.
This memorial was on Harding Avenue in Miami Beach, on the back of the property of the fallen tower. For those looking at the partially collapsed building and the rescue efforts going on, it's a clear vantage point.
Throughout Saturday morning, visitors paced up and down the avenue to visit the memorial and to catch a glimpse of the fallen building.
People who said they had relatives missing declined to comment. Some embraced each other, others prayed. Still others reached out and touched the faces on the photos they had just pinned.
Others caught the most direct view they could of the crumbled building, watching crews as they methodically sifted through rubble searching for survivors.
Gladys Perez lives just one block away from the collapsed building. On Thursday morning, she woke to flashing lights, leaving her disoriented about what was going on across the street.
"I didn't feel it, but the lights woke me up," Perez said in Spanish. "I saw crews pulling people out through their balconies.
"My husband has a great friend missing, and we don't know anything about them," she said. "They were on vacation here."
Viviana Eskenaci, with tears in her eyes, walked down the road with her daughter and dog. She lived at the Champlain Towers for six years. She and her husband sold the condo in 2010 to a woman who is still missing. Eskenaci is worried about her and many other friends and acquaintances who were living in the building.
"We built friendships there, and now I see all the pictures of people that we knew," Eskenaci said. "Everybody that we knew is missing."
"They were amazing neighbors," she said. "It was a really nice community, everybody was friendly. Everybody is missing now, but we are not giving up hope that somebody could be alive."
