SURFSIDE, Fla. — Piece by piece, the rescue workers dig at the multilayered mound of rubble. Moment by moment, time passes without finding life in the collapsed part of Champlain Towers South condominium building.
And that's starting to get to people trained to walk into catastrophes and walk out with saved lives.
"Sometimes all you can do is find a small, quiet corner and just cry for a little while, and let out some of that pressure that you've got building up," said Margarita Castro, a member of the search and rescue team and a Miami-Dade firefighter for 17 years. "We each have our moments of strength. We each have our moments of weakness."
The nature of the debris makes removal the digging version of that nightmare where you can't move as fast as you need because your legs won't let you.
"Again, with this type of collapse and what we're seeing in the debris, it's very difficult to move any of the large concrete slabs," Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Director Alan Cominsky said Wednesday. "It's just pulverized underneath. And, crumbling when we're trying to move them."
The hills and valleys of ruins are peppered with toys, wallets, passports, pictures. A Dora the Explorer backpack. Board games. Artifacts from households that are sent sliding down a black plastic half-pipe from the top of the pile down to the ground as workers methodically peel back layers of rubble.
Remnants of life reminding them of all those they haven't found yet.
Castro updates families regularly, difficult conversations that sometimes include painfully impossible requests.
"I've had a few moments, especially when I've had people come up to me and tell me, 'Please find my kids, please find my grandchildren,'" Castro said. "That wrenches. That pulls really hard at your heart because you want to. You want to bring those kids right back, but all we can do is just give them a big hug, and hold them and say that we're doing the best that we can."
