Miami building collapse: Australian family and friends pray for couple still missing
More bodies have been recovered from the Florida building collapse as friends and family pray for a Melbourne couple among the missing and rescuers search for survivors.
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The death toll after the collapse of a Florida apartment tower has risen to 10, authorities confirmed on Monday, more than four days after the building collapsed as residents slept.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said a tenth body had been retrieved from the rubble, and that 151 people remain unaccounted for.
“Our detectives are working right now, in real time, to audit this list,” Levine Cava said, adding that the numbers were still “very fluid, and they will continue to change.”
Experts are looking at possible pre-existing critical flaws in the structure of the apartment tower in Surfside, near Miami Beach, which collapsed into a pile of smoking rubble in the early hours of Thursday.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters that the “search will not stop until there is a resolution”.
The search has been painstakingly slow, hampered in the early days by a fire burning deep in the mountain of concrete and debris.
Officials have said they believe the fire is now under control and have stressed that there may yet be survivors buried in the rubble. Mayor Cava said that teams had cut a “deep trench” through the pile of twisted debris to assist in the search.
“It’s now 125 feet in length into the pile, it’s 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep,” she said, adding that it was “critical” to the search process, and that it was as a result of the trench that the additional bodies were recovered.
AUSTRALIAN CONNECTION TO MISSING MIAMI COUPLE
Consular assistance is being provided to two Australians whose non-Australian relatives reside in the building that horrifically collapsed in Miami causing 159 occupants to go missing in the rubble.
The US State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions has advised that the recovery operation following the collapse of the Champlain Tower South Condominium will continue into the coming days.
Meanwhile, friends and family are praying for a Jewish couple with Australian connections who are still among those missing after the Miami building collapse.
Tzvi and Itty Ainsworth’s names have been listed by a local Chabad website among other Jewish community members who are still unaccounted for.
A family member from Melbourne posted her call for “urgent prayers” after news of the tragic incident.
She said they were living in the 12-storey beachfront tower in Surfside.
“Urgent prayers needed for my uncle and aunt Tzvi and Itty Ainsworth,” she wrote on Facebook.
“The building they were living in collapsed last night and they have not been retrieved from the rubble. Please pray. We are believers, the sons of believers. We need a miracle.”
She tagged the couple’s other niece, Chanale Fellig-Harrel, an Israel-based musician, who took to Instagram to say “all of our hearts are bleeding”.
The missing elderly couple split their time between Melbourne, Sydney and Florida.
Local Joseph Waks said he was friends with the couple, aged in their 70s or 80s.
“It’s devastating,” he told the ABC. “They both became grandparents yet again a few hours before the tragedy. We still cannot believe it.”
Mr Waks, a media executive who previously lived in Australia, said that he believed the couple lived in the impacted area of the building.
“We’re hoping for the best, we’re hoping that there will be a miracle here in Surfside,” he said.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed they are providing consular assistance to the family of the residents.
A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said in a statement:
“DFAT is providing consular assistance to Australians concerned that two family members were in the building at the time of the collapse.
As those family members are citizens of other countries, our embassy in Washington is co-ordinating consular assistance with the relevant embassies.
Our embassy continues to work with the US authorities to identify non-US nationals affected by the collapse.
We are not currently aware of any Australians who were in the building at the time of the collapse.”
FIRE UNDER THE RUBBLE, BUT ‘STILL HOPE’ SAYS OFFICIALS
Florida officials continued to hold out hope Saturday, local time, for survivors of the high-rise apartment building that partially collapsed three years after an engineer had warned of “major structural damage.”
But fire was complicating the increasingly desperate effort to find the 159 people still unaccounted for more than two days after part of the building pancaked into a mountain of debris.
“We’re facing incredible difficulties with this fire,” Miami-Dade County mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters early Saturday. She said workers dug a trench to control the “very deep” blaze, but that smoke had spread throughout the site.
But, she added: “We continue to have hope. We’re continuing to search. We’re looking for people alive in the rubble, that is our priority and our teams have not stopped.”
The passage of time with no further survivors being found raised fears of a much higher death toll as rescuers sift through the debris with heavy machinery and sniffer dogs, and as increasingly frustrated families continued their agonising wait.
Two big cranes on Saturday continued shifting debris as the smell of burnt rubber and plastic hung in the baking Florida heat.
“All of our training tells us that for at least the first 72 hours, there are high likelihood of people that could be alive in there,” Danny Cardeso, with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, told CBS News.
‘MAJOR STRUCTURAL DAMAGE’
Authorities and experts have stressed that the causes for Champlain Tower South’s collapse are still unknown.
But the report of an engineering consultancy that studied the building in 2018, underlined early concerns.
It said its inspectors found “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below a ground-level pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling in the parking garage.
“Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,” warned the report, from the Morabito Consultants firm.
Most of the damage was “probably caused by years of exposure to the corrosive salt air along the South Florida coast,” it said.
The report did not indicate that the 40-year-old building risked collapse, but said it needed repairs to maintain “structural integrity.”
A lawyer for the building’s owners told the New York Times that work was “just about to get started” on the multimillion-dollar repairs.
MUM WITH BROKEN PELVIS SAVES DAUGHTER IN RUBBLE
A mother who suffered a broken pelvis in the horror Florida condo collapse managed to pull herself and her daughter alive from the rubble, despite a four-floor plunge, according to reports.
Mum Angela Gonzalez and her 16-year-old daughter, Devon, fell from the ninth floor to the fifth floor when part of the 12-story Champlain Towers South Condo in Surfside collapsed early Thursday morning, local time, New York Post reported.
Despite significant injury, Ms Gonzalez miraculously found a way to save her daughter. However her husband Edgar is among the missing.
Mother and daughter are being treated at the nearby Jackson Memorial Hospital, with family friend Lisa Melencial waiting by.
“Wasn’t something that I thought I would come down to this, I guess. But pick up the pieces, trying to figure out how to make this work, how to make this better than what it is,” Ms Melencial said.
“Even though it’s a tragic scenario. I just want prayers and just the best for her and her family. Hope for the best. Everybody just give prayers. Everybody else’s families or any colleagues or friends that were in the incidents, I wish you prayers, thoughts … And I hope everybody gets well.”
RELATIVES PROVIDE DNA TO FIND BODIES
Relatives of the missing inside the Miami Surfside apartment collapse are providing DNA samples to help identify remains as the rescue effort continued for a second day.
The first victim to be identified from the disaster is Stacie Fang, the mother of a boy whose dramatic rescue from beneath the rubble was caught on video.
Fang was taken to Aventura Hospital and Medical Centre but later died, authorities said.
“The many heartfelt words of encouragement and love have served as a much needed source of strength during this devastating time. On behalf of Stacie’s son, Jonah, we ask you now to please respect our privacy to grieve and to try to help each other heal.”
“There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Stacie. The members of the Fang and Handler family would like to express our deepest appreciation for the outpouring of sympathy, compassion and support we have received,” the family said in a statement, New York Post reported.
Handler was captured on camera being pulled from the debris on Thursday.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said a reunification site at a local community centre was compiling missing person reports and collecting distinguishing information.
Miami resident Pablo Rodriguez said he was losing hope for his mother and grandmother who were in the Champlain Towers South condominium building when it collapsed early Thursday morning, local time.
Mr Rodriguez told CNN he had given DNA at the community centre and that he was trying to comfort his young son, who was due to lunch with his grandmother.
“He’s asking us (where grandma is) and right now we’re not sure what to tell him,” Mr Rodgriguez told CNN.
“He may understand, I don’t know if he’s processed it completely.
“We’re trying to hold off until we officially know before we make it clear to him.”
Authorities have said it could take more than a week to finish searching the debris from the 12-storey tower.
An unknown number of residents were asleep in the 12-storey building in the town of Surfside, when one of its wings was reduced early Thursday morning to a gigantic pile of debris.
RAIN HAMPERS RESCUE EFFORTS
Rescue teams with sniffer dogs worked through a second night despite heavy rain – clinging to the diminishing chance of finding additional survivors.
Their efforts were illuminated by lights shining on the debris, with the recovered bodies put into yellow bags and transported away as homicide detectives worked to confirm their identities.
“We will continue search and rescue because we still have hope that we will find people alive,” said Levine Cava – who described the dedication of the dozens of rescuers on site as “incredibly moving.”
“They are totally, totally motivated to find people. They have to be pulled off the shift. That is how motivated they are to continue their efforts,” she said.
US President Joe Biden declared an emergency in response to the disaster, ordering federal assistance for the local relief effort.
At a Surfside community centre, relatives of the missing wept as they waited for news. Tenants of the ruined building who were lucky enough to have been away when disaster struck pondered sudden homelessness.
Erick de Moura, 40, happened to spend Wednesday night at his girlfriend’s house.
“I just came back and the scene is shocking,” he said. “There is a lot of pain. I’m blessed that I am alive.”
Danny Rivero, a reporter from National Public Radio in South Florida who was talking to those gathered at the tragedy, described it as “an international disaster”.
“We’ve been told many Argentinians and Australians were in the building as well, and that all are unaccounted for,” he said on Twitter. “This is an international disaster.”
FEARS BUILDING COULD COME DOWN
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said there were fears the rest of the building could come down.
“We are afraid the building may be in danger of additional collapse,” Mayor Burkett said.
“The problem is the building has literally pancaked. It has gone down and I mean, there’s just feet in between stories where there were ten feet. That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me that we are going to be successful, as successful as we want to be to find people alive.”
Burkett said firefighters and rescue workers were putting themselves in danger to try to find survivors.
“Those guys, those guys deserve all of our respect and credit and anything else we can give them because they are real heroes,” he said.
A cause was not immediately clear but one researcher who studied rising sea levels and building stability in Miami said that the 1981 towers had been “sinking” since the 1990s.
Work was also underway on the roof of the building and Mayor Burkett said investigators would probe whether this contributed to the tragedy.
Video of the disaster showed there was little warning, with a woman posting security footage from inside her apartment that showed the room shaking for just 13 seconds before the feed cut off.
“This is a video from my camera footage inside from the start of the collapse until the lose (sic) of connection (I was away from the building today). Towards the end, you hear the structure failing,” the woman posted on Twitter.
Desperate families had gathered near the site as salvage crews combed tonnes of debris from the collapse, which was captured in dramatic video.
“One side of the building just fell completely. It doesn’t exist anymore,” said Nicolas Fernandez, 29, an Argentinian resident of Miami who had yet to hear from friends who were staying overnight in his family’s unit in the building.
At least 18 Latin American nationals are known to be among the missing, according to the country’s consulates. They are three Uruguayans, nine Argentines and six Paraguayans.
Among the missing were Sophia López Moreira, the sister-in-law of Paraguay’s president and her young family.
Mayor Burkett said there was no indication of what caused the collapse and that Miami-Dade police were leading the investigation.
“It’s hard to imagine how this could have happened. Buildings don’t just fall down,” he said.
The building was occupied by a mix of full-time and seasonal residents and renters, and officials have stressed it is unclear how many people were actually inside at the time.
“It’s hard to get a count on it,” Miami-Dade County Commissioner Sally Heyman told CNN. “You don’t know between vacations or anything else.
“The hope is still there, but it’s waning.”
Some residents were able to walk down the stairs to safety while others had to be rescued from their balconies.
Professor Shimon Wdowinski from Florida International University told USA Today that the building had been undergoing a structural inspection.
“I looked at it this morning and said, ‘Oh my god.’ We did detect that,” Prof. Wdowinski told the outlet on Thursday.
Prof. Wdowinski said the coastal building was erected in 1981 and had been sinking into the ground since the 1990s.
His findings were in a 2020 research report into the impact of rising sea levels and coastal flooding.
He said the Champlain Towers South in Surfside had been sinking at a rate of about 2mm a year in the 1990s.
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