SURFSIDE, Fla. — Tuesday marked the sixth day since the catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building, as rescuers forged ahead with their painstaking search for survivors amid a deepening gloom over the fate of 150 people who are still reported missing.
The official death toll still stands at 11, with all victims’ families having been notified. But that number is expected to rise.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said there were “no new fatalities” to report as of noon Eastern time Tuesday, while she praised more than 200 rescue personnel for their “grueling work” under “extremely difficult circumstances.”
At a news conference, she also noted that President Joe Biden plans to visit Surfside and the site of the condo collapse on Thursday. Biden has been receiving regular updates on the disaster and has committed federal assistance to the search efforts.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also spoke about the magnitude of the tragedy and its global impact, saying it has been “very heartbreaking.” He said the 11 victims whose lives have been lost and those still missing are “invariably incredibly special people” who have touched others “all across the world.”
Family members of those unaccounted for remained hopeful, despite the strong undercurrent of despair and futility. A couple of hundred people gathered Monday night at a beach vigil to remember the victims of the building collapse, with both relatives and strangers joining in the silence and the pain.
“I have not lost any hope or faith,” said Martin Lagesfeld, whose 26-year-old sister Nicole lived in unit 804 of Champlain Towers South with her husband, Louis. “I know she’s still there, I know it,” Lagesfeld told WPLG-TV.
On Tuesday morning, Carlos Vecchio, the Venezuelan ambassador named by Juan Guaidó, the interim president recognized by the U.S. government, was at the Surfside emergency command center a block away from the Champlain Towers South building. He said he visited the site of the collapse and has been in touch with many of the families of the six Venezuelans considered missing.
So far, two of them have been identified as victims.
“We’re here to express our solidarity with the relatives who’ve had to endure this tragedy that has been so hard, so complex, and that we feel is our own,” Vecchio said. “We say we feel it is our own because the city of Miami, the state of Florida is home in the U.S. for Venezuelans. It is where you have the largest number of Venezuelans. But it is also where you have the greatest number of Latin Americans who come mainly from South America. So this tragedy isn’t foreign. It is our own. “
He said the U.S. State Department has helped expedite visas for the family members of victims who are still abroad and at least one Venezuelan family has made it to Miami. Vecchio added their department has also helped arrange connections for family members of Uruguayans who are also missing.
Nearby, Ida Roa and her husband, Mario Gonzalez, who have lived a few blocks south of the condo building for several decades, went to a makeshift memorial to pay their respects. They were hanging the photo of Leidy Luna Villalba, the 23-year-old nanny who had arrived with the family of Paraguay’s first lady at the Champlain Towers South the day before it collapsed.
Villalba’s story has resonated widely in her native country — it was Villalba’s first trip outside Paraguay — because of what her trip symbolized for much of the South American country’s working poor. She was a nursing student and was earning money to help support her family.
Still, her photo had been missing from the memorial wall. Roa fixed that.
“I’m really emotional and I feel immense sadness to come here and visit all the people who are disappeared and hopefully by some miracle they are found alive,” said Roa, who is from Paraguay. Though she did not know them, Roa said she aches for the Paraguayans who were in the collapse.
Her husband, Gonzalez, also has a childhood friend from Miami missing in the rubble, Oresme Gil Guerra and his wife, Betty Guerra.
“We used to live in the same place and we used to play as kids before going to school,” said Gonzalez, 65, who is Cuban. “He moved just three months ago.”
“It feels like time is beating us,” he said. “Time, as in the bad weather and the rain we’ve had which has obstructed the rescue efforts and the time that has been passing that is diluting the chances of finding people alive.”
The memorial wall, on Harding Avenue a block from the condo building’s collapse, has become a makeshift place of remembrance and tribute. Hydrangeas, roses, orchids and lilies hang from the tennis court fence at the memorial wall, which is overflowing with photos of the missing, messages of love and small artifacts. The flowers create a pleasant scent and quick respite from the sound of generators and vans.
A few first responders took advantage of the quiet — and dry — morning to pay their respects at the makeshift memorial. Inside the tennis court, huge brown tents had been set up. The clothes of rescuers, including T-shirts, coats, jeans and underwear, had been lined up and hung up to dry.
Meanwhile, cranes at the scene on Collins Avenue and 88th Street moved slowly but steadily to remove buckets of rubble. Apartments still standing next to the collapsed sections of the tower were numbered 2 through 11 in green spray paint to identify the levels.
Rescue crews continued digging a large trench through the rubble of the collapsed 136-unit Surfside condo tower. They used heavy equipment to create the trench, which is described to be 125 feet long, 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep. It was created for two purposes.
One of the reasons is to let rescuers search for survivors in other parts of the pile with their dogs, cameras, sonar and infrared technology. It was also part of an effort to combat a “deep” fire that the county’s mayor, Levine Cava, described over the weekend as “hampering” search efforts.
Levine Cava said the smoke was the “biggest barrier” for the search-and-rescue mission. She said crews worked nonstop under the rubble to stop it, using infrared red technology, foam, water and other tactics to contain the fire and minimize the smoke, which had spread through the pile.
The fire was eventually extinguished — “one less thing the men and women in the pile have to worry about now,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said.
Burkett said that, In speaking with families of those unaccounted for Tuesday morning, he was asked how long individuals can survive under the rubble.
Burkett recounted a story from May 2013, when a woman survived a building collapse in Bangladesh and was pulled from the rubble 17 days after the crash.
“No one is giving up hope,” Burkett said. “No one is stopping.”
Burkett said families also expressed frustration about why search and rescue work has been paused occasionally due to rain.
On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said that 3 million pounds of concrete have been removed from the site of the condo collapse but there are still barriers to progress in the search efforts. He said rescue workers are not going back into the west section of the building facing Collins Avenue that is still standing because it is too dangerous, and he also said that they cannot enter a large area under the rubble on the eastern side because of the same risk.
Still, officials said that rescuers have identified small voids or crevices in the rubble during the operation. While it does not necessarily mean survivors will be found, they said, they are still pursuing every possible option that could lead them to finding residents.
Behind some of the efforts to find survivors are at least two small unmanned devices sent from a Massachusetts-based company over the weekend to the Surfside collapse scene. They are equipped with technology that can aid in the search for humans, including thermal sensors and 360 degree camera views, that have previously helped authorities in hostage situations, the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11, mass shootings and to disable bombs.
“The idea behind our systems is, send the robots in first,” said Tom Frost, vice president of unmanned ground solutions at Teledyne FLIR. “They’re exactly the right tool to send into unsafe situations.”
Frost said they’ve sent two different robots: the PackBot 510, which is about the size of a suitcase, and the FirstLook, a tiny and throwable robot that is the size of a brick.
They both have a rugged outer surface that can climb over uneven surfaces and are linked with encrypted radio frequency, so they can travel far without losing signal. The smaller device in particular can fit in smaller spaces without risking first responders’ lives.
“When we responded to the 9/11 tragedy we took the systems down,” Frost said. “The PackBot was brought down and we used that primarily for searching the buildings on the periphery of the World Trade Center.”
As the grim search for survivors and the recovery of bodies continued, heightened attention turned to newly uncovered information about the structural problems in certain areas of the condo tower at 8777 Collins Ave.
An engineer’s 2018 report flagged “major structural damage” in the pool deck, entrance ramp and garage areas of the Champlain Towers South, yet the chief building official for the town of Surfside told residents the condo building was “in very good shape,” according to minutes from a November 2018 board meeting obtained by the Miami Herald.
Ross Prieto, who left the post last year, had reviewed the engineer’s report, the minutes say. Records show condo board member Mara Chouela forwarded a copy to him two days earlier.
An email posted on the town’s website showed that Chouela sent Prieto two reports: the “structural field survey report” by engineer Frank Morabito of Morabito Consultants detailing the building’s structural deficiencies, and a mechanical and electrical engineering report by Thomas E. Henz. P.E.
Then USA TODAY reported Monday that a letter sent in April from the president of the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association said that damage to the doomed building’s basement garage had “gotten significantly worse” since an inspection about 2 1/2 years earlier and that deterioration of the building’s concrete was “accelerating.”
The letter suggested that millions of dollars in needed repairs had been a subject of frustration among residents. The letter offers a glimpse into the events leading up to the building’s collapse that left 11 people dead and 150 missing.
“We have discussed, debated, and argued for years now, and will continue to do so for years to come as different items come into play,” the letter said.
The April 9 letter was obtained by USA TODAY from a family member of two building residents missing. The author, Jean Wodnicki, president of the association’s board of directors, survived Thursday’s collapse, a condo association attorney said.
More recently, a commercial pool contractor who visited the condo building last Tuesday, just 36 hours before half of the structure unexpectedly collapsed, said he discovered water and related damage throughout basement-level garage.
“There was standing water all over the parking garage,” the contractor, who asked not to be named, told the Herald. He noted cracking concrete and severely corroded rebar in the pool equipment room.
He also took photos, which he shared with the Herald.
The contractor visited the condo building last week to put together a bid for a cosmetic restoration of the pool as well as to price out new pool equipment — a small piece of the multimillion-dollar restoration project that just was getting underway at the 40-year-old building.
Based on public records, video footage of the building’s collapse and other images of the property, several engineering experts told the Herald that they suspect the pool deck and parking garage area caved in first, which then caused the middle and oceanfront sections of the tower to crumble under their own weight.
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(Miami Herald staff writer Charles Rabin contributed to this story.)
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