%fficials pledge multiple probes into condo collapse
SURFSIDE, Fla. — 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 closely “at every possible angle” to prevent any other building from experiencing such a catastrophic failure.
MiamiDade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said she and her staff will meet with engineering and 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.”
At the same time, Florida officials said Tuesday that they have requested help from the federal government as they near the end of their sixth day searching the rubble of a collapsed Florida condo building. Kevin uthries of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said his agency had requested an additional searchandrescue team from the federal government, and that one would likely be coming from Virginia.
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 12story Champlain Towers South in Surfside. The disaster killed at least 12 people and left 19 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, ov. 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 1Ø days after a garment factory collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Also Tuesday, the White House announced that President Biden and first lady Jill Biden would travel to Surfside on Thursday.
Martin Langesfeld, whose sister, 26yearold Nicole Langesfeld, is missing in the collapse, also expressed hope that there are still survivors.
“We’re not alone in this. There’s hope. I really believe miracles do happen. Things like this have happened around the world,” he said during a vigil Monday night on the beach near the collapsed building.
The collapse has drawn scrutiny of the safety of older highrise buildings throughout South Florida. Cava ordered a 30day audit on whether buildings 0 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 building inspections have found four balconies in one building in MiamiDade County that “must be immediately closed due to safety concerns.”
Previous grand juries in South Florida have examined other largescale disasters, such as the 2018 collapse of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University, which killed six people. That investigation is ongoing.
Criminal charges in such matters are possible, such as the thirddegree felony murder and manslaughter charges brought in the 1996 crash of ValuJet Flight 592, which killed 110 people in the Everglades.
Work at the site has been deliberate and treacherous. Debris fell onto the search area overnight from the shattered edge of the part of the building that still stands. That forced rescuers to mark a “don’t go beyond here” line and focus their efforts on parts of the debris pile that are farther from the structure, Burkett told Miami television station WSVN.
Several members of an Israeli rescue team worked partly on hands and knees Tuesday over a small section of the rubble, digging with shovels, pickaxes and saws.