Rescuers suspend search for victims of collapsed condo as storm approaches Florida.
Approaching storm speeds up preparations for demolition of collapsed building
SURFSIDE, FLA. >> Rescuers suspended their search for the living and the dead in the rubble of a collapsed South Florida condo building Saturday to allow crews to start preparing the unstable remainder of the structure for demolition ahead of a tropical storm.
The search and rescue mission was halted in the afternoon as workers began the precarious business of boring holes to hold explosives in the concrete of the still-standing portion of the Champlain Towers South tower in Surfside, Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told relatives awaiting word on missing loved ones.
In the closed-door briefing, Jadallah said the suspension was a necessary safety measure because the drilling could cause the structure to fail. If that were to happen, he said, “It’s just going to collapse without warning.”
But in video that one of the relatives livestreamed on social media, one of them was heard calling it “devastating” that the search was on pause. She asked whether rescuers could at least work the perimeter of the site so as not “to stop the operation for so many painful hours.”
Also Saturday, the confirmed death toll from the partial collapse of the 12-story building rose to 24 with the discovery of two more bodies. There were 121 people still unaccounted for.
Concerns had been mounting over the past week that the damaged structure was at risk of failure, endangering the crews below.
The building won’t come down until Monday at the earliest, according to Jadallah. That estimate was based on how many holes the demolition team needs to drill, he said, adding that the process has to move slowly to prevent a premature collapse.
With Tropical Storm Elsa looming in the Caribbean and forecast to move toward the state in the coming days, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said demolishing the “tottering” and “structurally unsound” structure is the prudent thing to do.
Elsa was downgraded Saturday from a Category 1 hurricane to a tropical storm and could hit Florida as a tropical storm by Tuesday morning.
Meanwhile, in another development, engineers who have visited or examined photos of the wreckage of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex in Surfside, Florida, have been struck by a possible flaw in its construction: Critical places near the base of the building appeared to use less steel reinforcement than called for in the project’s original design drawings.
The observation is the first detail to emerge pointing to a potential problem in the quality of construction of the 13-story condo tower that collapsed last month, killing at least 24 and leaving at least 124 still unaccounted for.
Reached by phone, Allyn Kilsheimer, a forensic engineering expert hired by the town of Surfside to investigate the collapse, said the investigation was still in its early stages. But he confirmed there were signs that the amount of steel used to connect concrete slabs below a parking deck to the building’s vertical columns might be less than what the project’s initial plans specified.
“The bars might not be arranged like the original drawings call for,” Kilsheimer said in an interview. He said he would need to inspect the rubble more closely to determine whether in fact the slab-to-column connections contained less steel than expected.
R. Shankar Nair, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and former chair of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, was among the other engineers who reviewed photographs and saw inconsistencies between the design and the steel that remained visible in the columns.
The investigation of the collapse could take months, so preliminary observations and findings could change. Some engineers said the possible shortfall in steel rebar in the relatively small part of the building they had examined should not be seen as a cause of the collapse, but it could potentially have been one of several factors that allowed whatever initiated the problem to accelerate into a catastrophic failure.