On Friday, the death toll from the collapse of an apartment in Surfside, Florida, rose to 79, and 61 people are still missing 16 days after the disaster. The Mayor of Miami-Dade, Daniella Levine Cava (Daniella Levine Cava) called the 15 victims found in one day “heartbreaking” and added that rescuers were “moving forward with great urgency,” to bring closure to the families of those still missing.
Levine Cava said at an evening press conference, “All those who have passed … are leaving behind loved ones. They’re leaving behind devastated families. The magnitude of this tragedy is growing each and every day/”
“We know that there will be long-term impacts for the teams on the front line,” Levine Cava said. “They have given so much of themselves in these first two weeks.”
Authorities say they have added peer support personnel to rescue and emergency rescuers who have been working on the scene in Florida and other states. In the first few hours after most of the Champlain Towers collapsed, no survivors have been found.
“It’s important for us to talk,” Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said of the grueling 24/7 recovery mission.
Governor Ron DeSantis issued an order on Friday to suspend the payment of property taxes to residents of destroyed or demolished buildings because city and state officials pledged to provide financial assistance to the victims’ families. Disaster, because at least six families filed lawsuits.
The exact cause of the collapse is not yet known, but an engineer noted that city construction officials reportedly ignored “major structural damage” in 2019.
On Thursday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Paraguay announced that the body of the first lady Sophia López Moreira’s sister, her husband, and one of her children were the victims found in the rubble. A cat living on the ninth floor. Crash. According to WSVN, the apartment was miraculously found while wandering among the rubble on Friday.
Experts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), including the agency’s physical measurement laboratory, have made significant progress in “marking and transporting” more than 200 pieces of forensic evidence to find clues to the cause of the collapse. According to Levin Kava, the mayor said that 60 trucks transport 13 million pounds of concrete and debris from the site every day.
“It’s a little sunshine for the family,” Maria Gaspari, an animal advocate and a friend of the cat’s owners, told the station. “It’s good news in the middle of all this craziness and all this sadness. It brings hope, and we need that.”
Friday was the 16th time since the Champlain Tanan apartment building collapsed in the middle of the night, causing one of the deadliest building collapses in American history, excluding terrorist acts or fires. Miami-Dade County Fire Chief Allen Kominsky said the effort was a rescue mission, but after determining that the “survivability of life in the rubble” was low, the recovery began at midnight Wednesday. Meanwhile, some space has been set aside to allow the community to grieve.