The death toll in the partial collapse of a Florida apartment building has climbed to four — while the number of people unaccounted for following the collapse has risen to 159, the Miami-Dade County mayor said Friday.
“Unfortunately, this has been a tragic night. We do have 120 people now accounted for, which is very, very good news. But our unaccounted for number has gone up to 159,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told a news conference.
“In addition, we can tragically report the death count is now four,” she said. “I want to be very clear about the numbers. They are very fluid. … The search-and-rescue team worked throughout the night, and it was a very active scene.”
Miami-Dade Police Director Freddy Ramirez, whose agency assumed control of the investigation, said authorities were working with the medical examiner’s office to identify the victims. Eleven injuries were reported, with four people taken to local hospitals.
Assistant Miami-Dade Fire Chief Raide Jadallah said Friday that rescue crews heard sounds, though not voices, from the rubble – though some of the noises could be from shifting parts of the building’s twisted remains.
“We have hope, and every time that we hear a sound, we concentrate on that area … as we continue to hear those sounds, we concentrate on those areas,” he told reporters.
Cava said the search-and-rescue efforts will continue “because we still have hope we will find people alive.”
She noted that rescuers were at “extreme risk” sifting through the mountains of rubble.
“Debris is falling on them as they do their work. We have structural engineers on site to ensure that they will not be injured, but they are proceeding because they are so motivated and they are taking extraordinary risk on the site every day,” Cava said.
Meanwhile, Jadallah said the search-and-rescue efforts have shifted to the rubble.
“The entire building — the portion that’s still standing — was cleared by rescue crews. So at this point now, all resources have been shifted to the rubble, including from above and from below,” he said.
Scores of firefighters and rescue crews using dogs and microphones continued their painstaking search overnight to reach any possible survivors. Authorities have stressed it is still unclear how many people were inside the building when it collapsed.
The likelihood of a far deadlier outcome became apparent in the early morning when Miami Beach state Sen. Jason Pizzo visited the scene and said he watched bodies being removed from the remains of a large portion of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, near Miami Beach, the Miami Herald reported.
Pizzo said he saw staff under Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Dr. Emma Lew taking the remains of one person in a yellow body bag, while another body was marked for removal.
The grim scene unfolded as President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration, clearing the way for federal assistance in the state.
“The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate all disaster relief efforts,” according to a White House statement early Friday.
Biden was updated Friday morning on the rising number of people who are unaccounted for, a White House official told CNN, and he will receive regular updates throughout the day.
The president also is expected to address the tragedy Friday, as well as possibly visit the site next week, according to the network.
“We will stay in touch with the officials on the ground and determine if and when that would be appropriate — current focus is on and should be on rescue and recovery,” the White House official told CNN.
On Friday afternoon, Biden spoke with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and said his administration was ready to provide state and local officials with additional resources and assistance, the White House said.
Biden also expressed gratitude for the first responders and searchers working at the scene, and extended condolences to the families who lost loved ones and those still waiting to learn the fates of their relatives, the White House said.
Meanwhile, scores of relatives awaited word on their loved ones – and results of DNA swabs that could help identify victims — at a family reunification center almost 24 hours after the 12-story building collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Thursday.
Among the missing are Myriam Caspi Notkin, 81, and her husband Arnold “Arnie” Notkin, 87, the Miami Herald reported.
North Miami Beach Commissioner Fortuna Smukler, who grew up with the Notkins’ three daughters about 50 years ago, told the paper that she began losing hope when she learned that the couple lived in apartment No. 302.
They’re an elderly couple and Arnie wasn’t walking well, Smukler told the Herald, adding that she has spoken to the devastated daughters.
“At this point it would be a miracle … we’re hoping for a miracle,” she said.
Also unaccounted for is 65-year-old mother and grandmother Judy Spiegel, NBC Miami reported.
“We’re just hoping and praying that we’ll have some type of good news and hoping for a miracle,” Spiegel’s daughter, Rachel, told the news outlet.
The missing woman’s husband said: “My wife Judy, she’s an amazing person, college graduate, Series 7 license, real estate philanthropist,” adding that “she’s a tireless fighter to raise the experience of patients in health care and she’s been amazing.”
Paraguay’s First Lady Silvana López Moreira has reportedly arrived in Florida as the search goes on for her sister and the family of her sister.
The office of Paraguay’s president confirmed to CNN en Español that the first lady, her parents and her brother-in-law’s parents have arrived in the state on Thursday.
President Maruio Abdo Benítez’s sister-in-law Sophia López Moreira, her husband, Luis Pettengill, and the couple’s three children are all missing, as is a sixth Paraguayan national, Lady Luna Villalba, the nation’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement.
Moreira’s family reportedly owned a condo in the tower.
The missing family was in the US to receive COVID-19 vaccinations at the time of the building collapse, according to Paraguay’s Foreign Minister Euclides Acevedo, CNN reported.
A relative of Chile’s former president also is reportedly missing.
Pascale Bonnefoy told CNN Chile that her dad is the first cousin of the father of Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile and current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Bonnefoy said she has not been able to reach her father, who lived with his wife in the section of the building that collapsed.
“I contacted the consul, and he offered his help, but since there is no information either, there is not much that can be done,” Bonnefoy told the news outlet.
Also, Israeli media reported that the country’s consul general in Miami, Maor Elbaz, believes that 20 of its citizens are among the missing.
What caused the 40-year-old building to collapse in a matter of seconds remains unknown, though local officials said the tower was undergoing roof construction and other repairs.
“Fire and rescue are in there with their search team, with their dogs. It’s a very dangerous site right now. Very unstable,” Miami-Dade Police Director Freddy Ramirez said Thursday. “They’re in search-and-rescue mode, and they will be in that mode for a while. They are not quitting. They’re going to work through the night. They are not stopping.”
Chilling footage captured by a nearby surveillance camera showed an entire side of the building crumbling in two sections, one after the other, in billowing clouds of dust that spread across the neighborhood.
“At first it sounded like a flash of lightning or thunder,” said Barry Cohen, a former Surfside vice mayor and building resident who was rescued along with his wife.
“But then it just kept on — steadily for at least 15 to 30 seconds — it just kept on going and going and going,” he said, adding that there had been construction for more than a month on the building’s roof.
Late Thursday, DeSantis called the disaster “a really, really tragic situation so we’ll hope for the best in terms of additional recoveries, but we are bracing for some bad news just given the destruction that we’re seeing.”
During a news conference in Surfside on Friday afternoon, he also said, “We need a definitive explanation as to how this could have happened.”
The nation’s worst non-intentional structural collapse took place in 1981, when two skywalks collapsed inside the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City, Mo., killing 114 people.
That tragedy is surpassed only by the 2,606 who were slain when terrorists used hijacked passenger planes to bring down the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
With Post wires
