Miami condo collapse: Death toll rises to four with 159 still missing

Three more bodies have been pulled from the rubble of the collapsed 12-story Miami condo tower pushing the death toll up to four while officials revealed 159 people are still missing.

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava confirmed Friday morning that rescue teams had recovered the bodies of three more victims overnight. Their identities are not yet known and officials did not confirm their ages or genders.  

This comes after one woman was confirmed dead Thursday when she was pulled from the rubble and rushed to hospital.  

Cava said it had been a ‘tragic night’ but she remained ‘very hopeful’ that more survivors will be found and insisted it was still a rescue – rather than a recovery – mission at this time. ‘We still have hope that we will find people alive,’ she said.

Rescue teams worked through the night Thursday using dogs, sonar and heavy machinery to search for signs of life as they battled with fires reigniting in the rubble.

Officials said Friday sounds had been heard coming from areas, fueling hope more people will be found alive as the number of people unaccounted for climbed to 159.

The mayor said a total of 120 people have now been accounted for ‘which is very, very good news’ but warned that the number of missing was ‘very fluid.’  

Officials had initially said 99 people unaccounted for following the building’s collapse around 1:30am Thursday morning. 

But, with the tower housing a mix of seasonal and year-round residents, authorities were unsure exactly how many people were inside when it collapsed.  

Officials said Thursday they believed the building was ‘substantially full’ at the time and had pleaded to the public for information about anyone who may have been inside. 

Among the missing are the former president of Chile’s first cousin, the president of Paraguay’s sister-in-law and her family and a celebrity plastic surgeon. 

Now, more than 24 hours on from the collapse, at least 37 people have so far been rescued from the rubble or parts of the damaged building still standing, with 11 injured and four hospitalized.  

With the search entering its second full day Friday, Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Florida and federal assistance was drafted in to Miami while questions mounted over the cause of the tragedy and whether it could have been avoided.

It emerged Thursday that scientists had warned that the 1980s condo building was sinking and in a potentially dangerous condition one year before it collapsed, while it was due a safety certification review for the first time in 40 years. It had also just undergone improvements to its roof. 

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Ray Jadallah said Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) teams had arrived on the scene overnight following the president’s emergency declaration and were assisting the 130 firefighters already on the ground.  

Jadallah said a fire reignited in the building overnight but ‘it did not slow down our search and rescue operation.’ 

Sounds were heard coming from the rubble, he said, but rescue teams were unable to determine if the sounds were voices of survivors or not.

‘We are listening for sounds, it’s not specifically, you know human sounds, it could be…not necessarily tapping, it could be steel…it could be some of the debris kind of raining down,’ said Jadallah. 

‘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.’  

The focus of the search has now all turned to combing through the rubble after the parts of the building still standing were fully cleared, he added.  

‘So at this point now, all resources have been shifted to the rubble, including from above and from below,’ he said Friday. 

Heavy machinery will be used to pull some of the metal off the disaster site so teams can search for voids beneath where people could be trapped, he said.  

The mayor praised the rescue teams who are putting themselves at ‘extreme risk’ as they search for survivors. 

‘This work is being done at extreme risk to these individuals,’ she said. 

‘Debris is falling on them as they do their work. We have structural engineers on-site to assure that they will not be injured, but they are proceeding because they are so motivated and they are taking extraordinary risk.’   

Biden signed the emergency declaration just after midnight authorizing the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to coordinate disaster relief efforts with state and local officials to ‘save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in Miami-Dade County’.   

The White House said the president had been updated Friday morning and is expected to address the condo collapse during the day. 

Biden could visit the site of the disaster in Miami next week ‘if and when that would be appropriate’ to the officials on the ground, a White House official told CNN. 

The president said Thursday the federal government was ready to send in assistance but could not do so until Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency.

‘I say to the people of Florida, whatever help you want that the federal government can provide, we are waiting, just ask us, we’ll be there,’ he said.  

DeSantis declared the state of emergency in Florida Thursday night.   

A 2020 study from Florida International University found the Champlain Towers South sea-view condo development was sinking at a rate of about 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s because it sits on reclaimed wetlands. 

The oceanfront building was also due to have its safety recertified for the first time in 40 years this year which included the need for ‘extensive repairs for rusted steel and damaged concrete’ on parts of the structure. 

It has also been revealed that the tower had recently undergone construction work on its roof, sparking fears this may have piled on additional weight to the sinking structure. 

Authorities have not yet determined what caused the collapse and Miami-Dade police have opened an investigation – though Mayor Cava said ‘there has been no evidence found of foul play.’  

A total of 55 condos collapsed on Thursday – more than a third of the 136 within the building – with most belonging to first-time homeowners.   

Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University, told USA Today he knew instantly which building had collapsed when he heard news reports because he had studied the building for the report published last year.

‘I looked at it this morning and said ‘Oh my god.’ We did detect that,’ he said.  

Wdowinski said he found that Champlain Towers South was sinking at a rate of around 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s due to its position on wetlands but that rate could have slowed down or sped up since then.

However, the land’s slow sinking alone would not have caused the building to collapse, he said.

‘It was a byproduct of analyzing the data. We saw this building had some kind of unusual movement,’ Wdowinski told USA Today.

The paper was published in April 2020 in the academic journal Ocean and Coastal Management and was part of a wider look at how buildings in Miami were sinking generally with rising sea levels caused by climate change. 

‘In some locations, as in the eastern part of the city, the detected subsidence [sinking] is of a 12-story high condominium building,’ the paper ominously warns.

It’s not immediately clear if the 12-story building referenced in the paper is the condo that collapsed. It’s also not clear if any officials took note of the paper when it comes to shoring up any dangerous conditions in the area.

In a video posted by FIU, Wdowinski said hundreds of buildings can be sinking bit-by-bit – and hundreds of buildings can have cracks, not just in Miami. 

What would cause one to collapse would be an engineering problem, he said.

Wdowinski, who has previously conducted a number of land subsidence studies including one in Mexico City, noted in the video on Thursday that the tragic Mexico City Metro overpass collapse on May 3 that killed 26 people and injured 79 others had happened in an area where he had previously detected land subsidence.  

The Champlain Towers South development was built in 1981 by the late developer Nathan Reiber’s company Nattel Construction at 8777 Collins Avenue in the southeast corner of Surfside, but the structure hasn’t been updated significantly since then.  

It had a few two-bedroom units currently on the market at the time of the collapse with asking prices of $600,000 to $700,000. Some have sold for more than $2 million.

The area is a mix of new and old apartments, houses, condominiums and hotels, with restaurants and stores serving an international combination of residents and tourists.  

Local officials have said the condo block was right in the middle of going through a recertification process required by Miami Dade building code – which dictates that buildings have to be re-certified every 40 years. The building was due to be recertified for the first time since its construction this year.

Kenneth Direktor, a lawyer for the Champlain Towers South Association, told The Miami Herald on Thursday that to prepare for the recertification process an engineer had been hired to plan ‘structural and electrical’ updates but that work hadn’t started yet.

He told The New York Times that the building had been about to undergo ‘extensive repairs for rusted steel and damaged concrete’ but that he had seen nothing to suggest the collapse was related to issues identified in the engineering review.

Direktor added that any waterfront building as old as the Champlain Towers would have some corrosion and concrete deterioration and insisted on Thursday that it was too early to speculate about what had happened. 

The Miami Herald reported that Frank Morabito was the engineer retained by the Champlain towers but that he could not be reached for comment on Thursday. 

Direktor told The Washington Post on Thursday that the building was ‘thoroughly inspected’ recently as part of the recertification process and that a report on the inspection was sent to town authorities.

He described the report’s findings as ‘fairly typical’ for a building of its age and ‘did not cast doubt on its structural integrity,’ according to the outlet. 

‘There was nothing in the report that would have indicated a life-safety concern,’ he told The Washington Post.

Surfside Mayor Charles W. Burkett said roof renovations were being done on the property but that they should not have contributed to the collapse.

‘The building has literally pancaked. That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me that we are going to be as successful as we wanted to be in finding people alive,’ he said.

He instead described the collapse as a ‘catastrophic failure’ of the building. 

‘It’s hard to imagine how this could have happened,’ Burkett said. ‘Buildings just don’t fall down… There’s no reason for this building to go down like that unless someone literally pulls the supports out from underneath.’ 

He suggested that potential causes could be the result of the foundations being washed out or a sinkhole. 

JJI Supply, a general contracting company based in West Palm Beach, received a notice in April about the re-roofing of the building, The Real Deal reported. The outlet obtained records showing that Debra and Edward Campany of West Palm Beach lead the general contracting business.

Bruce Masia of KW Property Management & Consulting told Florida’s Biz Journal that the ongoing roof renovation on the property could have added extra weight that the building couldn’t withstand. 

‘Buildings don’t fall down right away. They fall down because there are problems and those problems need attention,’ he said.

However, Surfside Vice Mayor Tina Paul told The Washington Post on Thursday that Champlain Towers South passed a roof inspection on Wednesday – the day before the collapse.

Jeff Rose, a contractor whose parents live in the building, told the Miami Herald that he had done renovations for some of the condos and that work on the roof had started about six weeks ago.

He added that some concrete restoration work was also being done to fix old or damaged concrete but that the concrete work was not out of the ordinary. 

‘I didn’t notice anything I haven’t seen in many other buildings in South Florida,’ Rose told the outlet.

However, an engineer who specializes in concrete repair projects told the Miami Herald that one potential structural flaw called ‘concrete spalling’ jumped out at him when he watched video of the collapse

The engineer, Greg Batista, described the flaw as ‘concrete cancer’ and said that it happens when salt water seeps into porous concrete causing steel rebar in the support beams to rust and expand – which can break the concrete and weaken the beams. 

Surfside Commissioner Charles Kesl told Local 10 that there were also ‘garage underground issues’ found during various inspections recently relating to the recertification process.

‘And, to my understanding, there were some cracks from that project – minor cracks – that were just patched up. Nothing, based on my understanding, to the magnitude that would indicate that there was a structural problem that could result in something so catastrophic,’ Kesl said.

Kit Miyamoto, chair of the California Seismic Safety Commission also spoke to Anderson Cooper and said that Miami-Dade has actually good standards to examine buildings every year.

Miyamoto said it appears likely that corrosion was a culprit as the side of the building that collapsed was the side facing the ocean. Salt water could have gotten in and corroded the metal columns in the building.

If the soil is settling, that also could have affected the columns, as they get pulled in as the ground settles, Miyamoto said.

Miyamoto called rescue efforts ‘extremely dangerous’ but that ‘there’s definitely still hope’ that survivors of the building collapse could be found.

Even with concrete floors sandwiched on top of each other, air pockets are likely. People have been found in similar wreckage ‘days after,’ he said. 

Kobi Karp, an architect whose firm has worked on prominent Surfside and Miami Beach buildings, told The New York Times that the way the building had collapsed suggested a ‘possible internal failure.’

He said the internal failure may have been caused by ‘deterioration at the point where a horizontal slab of the building meets a vertical support wall’ – which he explained to the outlet could lead one of the building’s floors to suddenly fall and take the rest of the building down.

Karp said that such a deterioration could have happened either slowly over years or suddenly if the structure of the building was unintentionally damaged. 

Some people in Surfside had previously raised concerns about the integrity of the aging building. 

Barry Cohen, 63, the former vice mayor of Surfside, said he raised concerns years ago about whether nearby construction might be causing damage to the building after seeing cracked pavers on the pool deck.

In 2015, a resident also sued in 2015 claiming building management did nothing to repair cracks from water damage. 

Source: Daily Mail