Another body was found Monday in the wreckage of an apartment building that collapsed in Florida, a development that has increased the death toll from the tragedy to 28 dead so far, authorities said, assuring that investigations continue although the chances of finding survivors are now almost zero “, as an official put it.
Most of the building, the Champlain Towers South as it was called, collapsed overnight on June 24 in Surfside; it was one of the worst urban disasters in U.S. history.
As the tropical storm Elsa approached with its strong winds, the authorities decided to demolish the part of the building that was still standing, judging that it was too unstable and could threaten the lives of members of the rescue crews.
The controlled demolition unfolded late Sunday night “exactly as planned,” Miami-Date Mayor Daniela Levine Cava told a news conference.
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“From 01:00 (local time; 08:00 Greek time) the investigations resumed” and the crews managed to reach places that were inaccessible up to that stage, he added.
Later, it was announced that another body had been found. A few hours earlier, three more had been identified. The still temporary report of the disaster amounted to 28 dead and 117 missing.
Eleven days after the collapse, the chances of surviving the wreckage are now “almost nil”, said Golan Vak, head of Israel’s special search and rescue unit, which is operating on the local television station Local 10.
“We try to be optimistic but at the same time realistic,” he added. “The conditions we are seeing are very difficult to say, professionally, that we believe there is a good chance of finding someone alive,” Buck explained.
Only one of the occupants of the apartment building – a teenager – was pulled alive from the rubble in the first hours after the disaster. Since then, despite the mobilization of rescue teams from the US, Israel and Mexico, only corpses have been retrieved.
