Death toll hits 18 in Florida condo disaster
Remains of two children among those recovered
The death toll in last week’s collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla., rose by six, to 18, and now includes children, as the authorities said more bodies were recovered from the rubble Wednesday.
At a news conference Wednesday evening, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-dade County said as many as 145 people remained missing nearly a week after the desperate search for survivors began. The bodies of two children, ages 4 and 10, were found Wednesday.
“Any loss of life, especially given the unexpected, unprecedented nature of this event, is a tragedy,” Levine Cava, visibly emotional, said at the news conference, the second of the day. “But the loss of our children is too great to bear.”
Even as days passed with little hopeful news, officials said they remained focused on comforting families and continuing to search for any survivors in the rubble.
“While there’s an overwhelming amount of grief, there’s just still the apprehension about not knowing for sure,” Gov. Ron Desantis of Florida said Wednesday.
Inclement weather has continued to hamper the search effort, and Florida officials have requested extra help in case some state personnel are needed to respond to any future hurricanes. A system that could become a tropical storm has developed in the Atlantic Ocean, and officials said they were developing contingency plans as the search effort continued, although no impact was expected before Saturday.
“We have done this before, where we have responded to multiple emergencies in the state at the same time,” said Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
As the search in Surfside has dragged on, volunteers and rescue teams from across the country and beyond have gathered. Local leaders also warned of those trying to take advantage of the disaster, including by creating fraudulent online fundraising accounts.
Search teams said Tuesday that they had removed more than 3 million pounds of debris from the wreckage since Thursday, when a section of the oceanfront complex caved in during the early morning hours.
Yet as the pile of concrete, steel and personal effects slowly began to diminish, new warning signs pointing to the building’s critical failure began to emerge. A letter that the president of the condominium association wrote to residents in April publicly surfaced, revealing deep concerns about the building’s condition less than three months before it gave way.
Federal officials said they would begin a formal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the collapse that would move parallel to the search-and-rescue efforts.
“It will take time, possibly a couple years, but we will not stop until we have found the likely cause of this tragedy,” said James K. Olthoff, head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who described it as a “fact-finding, not fault-finding, technical investigation.”
Miami-dade County officials have declined to release a list of names of the nearly 150 people who remain unaccounted for. Many of their families remain gathered in South Florida, where they receive updates from officials and are able to ask them questions.
Magaly Delgado, 80, who left Cuba in the early 1960s, fearing she would speak out against the revolution, was among the missing, said her daughter Magaly Ramsey. On Monday afternoon, she was allowed to visit the site of the tragedy, where she decided that her mother had not survived.
“I’m a very logical, tough woman,” said Ramsey, who had a question for a rescue official nearby. Can a body just disintegrate?
The answer, Ramsey recalled, was “yes.”