SURFSIDE, Fla. – Firefighters battled smoke and time as the search continued for survivors after a 12-story beachfront condominium building collapsed just north of Miami early Thursday morning, killing at least four people and leaving 159 more unaccounted for.
A fire burning beneath the rubble hampered rescue efforts Saturday, officials said, as smoke spread laterally beneath the pile of debris.
“It’s a very deep fire, and it’s extremely difficult to locate the source, and therefore to stop it,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a press conference Saturday morning.
Miami-Dade County Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said smoke picked up as debris was removed, forcing firefighters to reevaluate and adjust their efforts. Air quality was becoming a concern, he said, with the possibility of using ventilators being weighed against the chance that employing them could intensify the blaze.
“It’s a very delicate matter,” Cominsky said. “The biggest thing here is hope. That’s what’s driving us right now.”
A wing of the residential building in Surfside, Florida, came down with a roar at about 1:30 a.m. Thursday. Video footage captured from nearby showed the center of the building appearing to fall first, with a section nearest the ocean teetering and coming down seconds later as a huge dust cloud swallowed the neighborhood.
The building, Champlain Towers South, was built in 1981 and was up for its required 40-year inspection before its collapse. Levine Cava said Saturday she was directing the county’s Department of Economic and Regulatory Resources to immediately begin an audit of all buildings at the 40-year mark and beyond, to be completed within 30 days.
“We want to make sure every building has completed its certification process and move swiftly to remediate any issues that have been identified in that audit,” she said.
It remains unclear why the building collapsed. Researchers and engineers pointed to a variety of possibilities, including sea-level rise, the corrosive effect of saltwater, the stability of the ground underneath or more mundane matters like shoddy construction or lax oversight.
Late Friday, the town of Surfside posted several documents to its website related to the collapsed building. None appeared to contain details that would explain the beachside building’s collapse but did reveal multiple, potentially serious, issues.
Here’s what we know Saturday:
Families, friends adorn makeshift memorial
Tearful families and sentimental residents adorned a makeshift memorial Saturday with flowers, candles, photos, trinkets and notes for loved ones. Relatives of the missing embraced each other as and prayed, and some reached out and touched the faces on the photos they had just pinned.
Others caught the most direct view they could of the crumbled building, watching crews methodically sift through rubble searching for survivors. In obvious distress, onlookers expressed frustration with the slow speed of rescue efforts but declined to comment further.
Gladys Perez, who lives one block away from the collapsed building, said she woke Thursday morning to flashing lights, disoriented. She saw crews pulling people out through their balconies, she said.
“Today is the third day, and I think a lot of the families are feeling desperate,” Perez said in Spanish. “I understand how they feel. When someone is frustrated, time feels very long, but I think the crews are doing the best they can. They are out there risking their lives too.”
Viviana Eskenaci walked tearfully down the road with her daughter and dog Saturday morning. She said she and her husband lived at Champlain Towers for six years and sold their condo in 2010 to a woman who is still missing. Eskenaci said she is worried about her and many other friends and acquaintances still living in the building.
“We built friendships there, and now I see all the pictures of people that we knew,” Eskenaci said. “Everybody that we knew is missing.”
Meanwhile, the Miami Dolphins, the area’s NFL team that plays home games about 12 miles northwest of Surfside, was working with its Dolphins Food Relief Program partner Seed Miami Food Truck to provide meals to families and first responders.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families as they deal with this sudden and tragic loss. We also appreciate our first responders and volunteers that have worked tirelessly today to lead rescue and relief efforts,” the team said in a statement.
– Jesse Mendoza, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Fire hampering rescue efforts
Responders heard sounds from the rubble as the search efforts for survivors commenced, but those signs have gone dormant with the passing hours, officials said Saturday.
“You wake up in the morning hoping more and more people were pulled out and that just isn’t what has happened,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at Saturday morning’s press conference.
While search-and-rescue teams remain hopeful, he said, the ongoing fire is “the No. 1 problem” as firefighters “do not know where it is coming from or how extensive it is.
“The stench is very thick and it obviously has created quite an obstacle,” DeSantis said.
Firefighters utilized infrared technology, foam and water in an attempt to locate the blaze, their efforts stymied by heavy rains common in South Florida this time of year.
DeSantis said officials are considering evacuation of the condominium complex’s north tower, which like the collapsed south tower was built in 1981 according to the same design.
Meanwhile, the Miami-Dade Police Department announced that beginning Saturday evening, officers would be working 12-hour shifts with days-off cancelled as a result of staffing and resources deployed to the collapse site.
First victim identified as Stacie Fang
The death toll from the collapsed condominium building is at four as of Saturday morning. On Friday, relatives issued a statement identifying one of the deceased as Stacie Fang. Fang, 54, died at a hospital from blunt force injuries, the medical examiner’s office told NPR.
Her son, Jonah Handler, was rescued from the rubble hours after the collapse. The teen boy — who according to Miami’s WSVN is a sophomore, junior-varsity baseball player at a local high school — was rescued by Nicholas Balboa, who was walking his dog near the buildings around midnight when he heard the ground shake, followed by a loud crash. He approached the piles of concrete and metal and heard a scream.
Balboa said he spotted fingers popping out through the broken concrete and heard a boy’s voice say, “Can somebody see me?” Balboa said he climbed over rubble to reach the boy, later identified as Handler. “He was just saying, ‘Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.’ I told him: ‘We’re not gonna go anywhere. We’ll be here,'” Balboa said. Read more here.
— Gabriela Miranda and Rachel Aretakis, USA TODAY
Condo’s inspection reports detail ‘concrete deterioration’
The documents that Surfside town officials posted online Friday date to 2018, with engineers noting design flaws and failing waterproofing that warned of “exponential damage” about 990 days before much of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex collapsed.
The reports, from few pages to several hundred pages long, range from detailed plans to permits for concrete repair to a courtesy notice reminding residents to turn off exterior lights so baby turtles wouldn’t be confused when they hatched and not make it to the safety of the ocean.
An inspection report from Oct. 8, 2018, found “abundant” cracking and spalling of the columns, beams and walls in the garage under the tower that fell to the ground. Spalling refers to the deterioration of concrete, sometime causing flaking and the exposure of reinforcing steel bars known as rebar.
“Abundant cracking and spalling of varying degrees were observed in the concrete columns, beams and walls” of the ground floor parking garage, according to a structural field survey report by Maryland-based Morabito Consultants.
It appears plans to correct these problems were not solidified until April of this year, despite the original report having been issued in October 2018. “Though some of this damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion,” the report noted. Read more here.
— Elizabeth Weise and Kyle Bagenstose, USA TODAY
Multiple factors could have contributed, experts say
Researchers and engineers are trying to figure out what caused the building’s early morning collapse and what that might mean for other aging high-rises along the Florida coast and the rest of the country.
For now, there are no clear answers. USA TODAY spoke Friday with more than a dozen experts without finding a consensus. Some pointed to sea-level rise and the corrosive effect of saltwater brought with encroaching tides. Others wondered about the stability of the ground beneath or more mundane matters like shoddy construction or lax oversight.
On this point experts did all agree: It will take a long time to discern exactly how and why Champlain Tower South collapsed and once the answers are known, they’re likely to prompt changes to the building industry.
“The whole regulatory apparatus is behind the times, relative to current risks,” said Clinton Andrews, a professor of urban planning and director of the Center for Green Building at Rutgers University. “I think the case in Florida illustrates that problem.” Read more here.
— Kyle Bagenstose, Elizabeth Weise, Erin Mansfield, Aleszu Bajak, USA TODAY
Rescue efforts have galvanized area’s Jewish community
South Florida’s tight-knit Jewish community has been both devastated and mobilized by the tragedy.
At least 35 of the 159 people still unaccounted for are Jewish, Maor Elbaz-Starinsky, consul general of Israel in Miami, told USA TODAY Saturday. In the aftermath, multiple synagogues, individuals and community partners have responded in an outpouring of financial, logistical and spiritual support.
On WhatsApp, prayer groups read psalms and posted photos of the missing, while members of Skylake Synagogue, about 20 minutes from Surfside in North Miami Beach, collected clothing, blankets and essentials for families awaiting news.
Hatzalah, a rescue team of Orthodox Jews, has been on the scene since Thursday.
“When darkness and tragedy fall upon us, it’s our duty as a community to come together,” said Rabbi Leib Ezagui of the Jewish Community Synagogue in North Palm Beach. “It doesn’t make sense, and we may never be able to wrap our heads around it. But one thing we can be certain of is that by doing good deeds and lending a helping hand in whatever way we can, we are planting a seed that can forever be nurtured.”
Many of the missing have roots around the world. Nine Argentinian nationals, six Colombian nationals and six Paraguayan nationals were unaccounted for Thursday, and three Uruguayans were affected, according to country officials. The missing Paraguayans included the family of Paraguay’s first lady. Read more about the missing, including a list of names, here.
Contributing: Associated Press; Grace Hauck, Ryan Miller and Christal Hayes, USA TODAY; John Bisognano, The Palm Beach Post.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida building collapse update: Death toll at 4, Stacie Fang ID’d