Death toll grows to 12 as rescue workers forge ahead
The official death toll grew to 12 and the number of missing was at 149. Rescue crews continued the search for survivors and remains.
As the sixth day since the catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers South Condo came to an end, rescuers progressed with their painstaking search for survivors as families and friends await any information regarding
the fate of 149 people who are still reported missing.
On Tuesday night, a long line of Miami-Dade County police cars and medical examiner vans headed toward the site on Collins Avenue.
The official death toll stands at 12 — though that number is expected to rise.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the county is working to audit the list of the missing in an effort to remove duplicate
names and provide more accurate data.
“We are sifting through all this information . ... This is a slow and methodical process,” she said.
As of Tuesday night, 149 people remain missing.
Moving forward, Levine Cava said authorities would separate the number of dead from those accounted for — which were previously combined. She added that rescue crews continued working to find victims.
“They have been working nonstop as you know for six days,” she said.
The commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit told CNN on Tuesday that the collapsed bedrooms in the building are buried under 13 to 16 feet of concrete.
President Joe Biden will visit Surfside and the site of the condo collapse on Thursday.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also spoke about the magnitude of the tragedy and its global impact Tuesday, saying it has been “very heartbreaking.” He said the 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, with relatives and strangers joining in the silence and the pain.
“I have not lost any hope or faith,” said Martin Langesfeld, 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,” Langesfeld told WPLG-ABC 10.
SEARCH EFFORTS PROCEED, AS STORMS THREATEN
Cranes at the scene on Collins Avenue and 88th Street continued to move slowly but steadily to remove buckets of rubble Tuesday. 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 searchand-rescue mission. She said crews worked nonstop under the rubble to stop it. They used infrared red technology,
foam, water and other tactics to contain the fire and minimize the smoke, which had spread through the pile.
On Tuesday, MiamiDade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said three million pounds of concrete have been removed but there are still obstacles in the search efforts. He said rescue workers are not going back into the west section of the building facing Collins Avenue — the section that is still standing — because it is too dangerous. He also noted that they cannot enter a large area under the rubble on the eastern side because of the same risk.
Behind some of the efforts to find survivors are at least two small unmanned devices sent from a Massachusettsbased company during the weekend. They are
equipped with technology that can aid in the search for humans, including thermal sensors and 360degree camera views that have helped authorities in hostage situations, the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11, mass shootings and in disabling bombs.
The efforts, however, might be affected by the potential for storm activity in Florida. With every Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force currently deployed to Surfside, authorities have requested the deployment of an additional searchand-rescue team to Surfside to free up some crews to potentially respond to a storm impact elsewhere in Florida.
Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said he and Cominsky made the decision together to request additional resources from the federal government — in case a storm comes to Florida in the next week.
Cominksy said authorities had already requested to have three federal teams on standby in case they’re needed. One will now be deployed to Surfside, he added.
“Due to the recent five-day forecast with two storms, we decided that it would be best to go ahead
and activate them,” he said.
STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS
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, the chief building official who left the post last year, announced Tuesday that he has taken a leave of absence as Doral’s temporary building official.
An email posted on the town’s website showed that condo board member Mara 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 on 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 two and a half years earlier and that deterioration of the building’s concrete was “accelerating.”
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 the basement-level garage.
“There was standing water all over the parking garage,” the contractor, who asked not to be named, told the Miami Herald. He noted cracking concrete and severely corroded rebar in the pool equipment room.
He also took photos, which he shared with the Miami 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 multimilliondollar restoration project that just was getting underway at the 40-yearold 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.
CITIES EXPLORE INSPECTION CHANGES
In efforts to instill confidence in aging buildings, local governments across MiamiDade County on Tuesday began to explore changes in regulations.
At a morning press conference, Levine Cava announced her administration planned its own set of recommendations after she calls a series of meetings with experts on condominium law, geology, building safety, and other areas of expertise tied to the questions raised by the Surfside collapse.
The meetings are being called “so my staff and I can develop a set of recommendations and changes that need to be made at all steps of the building process to assure a tragedy like this will never happen again,” she said.
At an online forum with the Brickell Homeowners Association and Haber Law, the head of Miami’s building department outlined the city’s new plan to push owners of older buildings to get their structures inspected.
The city wants buildings that are taller than six stories and are also 40 years or older to hire structural engineers to check for “visible signs of distress” on the structures — even if the buildings have already passed their recertification process.
“We want to go above and beyond what the code calls for,” added Asael Marrero, director of the Miami Building Department. “The code, right now, doesn’t allow me to mandate it.”