Florida officials push for answers
Bidens plan to visit site of condo tragedy as search continues
SURFSIDE, Florida — Elected officials pledged Tuesday to conduct multiple investigations into the collapse of an oceanfront Florida condo tower, vowing to convene a grand jury and to look “at every possible angle” to prevent any other building from experiencing such a catastrophic failure.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said she and her staff will meet with engineering, construction and geology experts, among others, to review building safety issues and develop recommendations “to ensure a tragedy like this will never, ever happen again.”
State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said she will pursue a grand jury investigation to examine factors and decisions that led to Thursday’s collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South in Surfside. The disaster killed at least 12 people and left 149 unaccounted for.
Even as officials looked to the future to determine the cause of the collapse, they were resolute in vowing to continue the effort to find survivors.
On the sixth day of a painstaking search, Gov. Ron DeSantis evoked a wellknown military commitment to leave no one behind on the battlefield and pledged to do the same for the people still missing in the rubble.
“The way I look at it, as an old Navy guy, is when somebody is missing in action, in the military, you’re missing until you’re found. We don’t stop the search,” DeSantis
said at a news conference.
“I think that’s what is happening. Those first responders are breaking their backs trying to find anybody they can. I think they are going to continue to do that. They’ve been very selfless. They’ve put themselves at risk to do it.”
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett cited the case of a woman who was found alive 17 days after a garment factory collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
“No one is giving up hope here . ... We are dedicated to getting everyone out of that
pile of rubble,” Burkett said.
Also Tuesday, the White House announced that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden would travel to Surfside on Thursday.
Biden has offered federal help and extended his concerns to the community as people “grieve their lost loved ones and wait anxiously as search and rescue efforts continue,” as he said in a tweet.
“They want to thank the heroic first responders, search and rescue teams, and everyone who has been working tirelessly around the clock and meet with the families who have been
forced to endure this terrible tragedy waiting in anguish and heartbreak for word of their loved ones,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
Meanwhile, weeks before the collapse, the president of Champlain Towers South Condo board wrote that structural problems identified in a 2018 inspection had “gotten significantly worse” and owners needed to pay a hefty price to get them fixed.
The April 9 “Dear Neighbors” letter from board president Jean Wodnicki hinted at an ongoing debate over the repairs and a reluctance by some condo owners to pay for work that would cost at least $15.5 million.
“A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by. But this is where we are now,” she wrote in the letter, which was confirmed to the AP by a spokesman for the condo board.
Wodnicki noted costs had increased since an October 2018 report by engineering firm Morabito Consultants first identified key issues with weakening concrete, and she predicted they would only grow more if put off any longer.
The collapse has drawn scrutiny of the safety of older buildings throughout South Florida.
Cava ordered a 30-day audit on whether buildings 40 years old or older are complying with a required recertification of their structural integrity, and that any issues raised by inspections are being addressed.
On Tuesday, the mayor said inspections have found four balconies in one building in Miami-Dade County that “must be immediately closed due to safety concerns.”
Previous grand juries in South Florida have examined other disasters, such as the 2018 collapse of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University, which killed six people. That investigation is ongoing.
Authorities on Tuesday said it’s still a search and rescue operation, but no one has been found alive since hours after the collapse Thursday.
The pancake collapse of the building left layer upon layer of intertwined debris, frustrating efforts to reach anyone who may have survived in a pocket of space.
Authorities meet frequently with families to explain what they’re doing and to answer questions. They have discussed how DNA matches are made to help identify the dead, how next-of-kin will be contacted and explained in “extreme detail” how they are searching the mound, Cava said.
She said families are coming to their own conclusions.
“Some are feeling more hopeful, some less hopeful, because we do not have definitive answers. We give them the facts. We take them to the site,” she said. “They have seen the operation. ...They are preparing themselves for news, one way or the other.”