A total of nine people have been pronounced dead as authorities scramble to recover over 150 people who remain unaccounted for after part of a Miami-Dade condominium building crumbled to the ground on Thursday.
Sunday’s development was announced by Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava in a press conference four days after 55 units within Champlain Towers South, a 12-story structure that contained 136 apartments, were reduced to a 30-foot-high pile of rubble. A total of four victims have been identified thus far, including Antonio Lozano, 83, Gladys Lozano, 79, Manuel LaFont, 54, and Stacie Fang, 54. Cava insisted one of her priorities was finding the identity of the new corpses through DNA evidence.
“We are making every effort to identify those others that have been recovered,” the mayor said.
MIAMI CONDO BUILDING NEEDED $9 MILLION IN REPAIRS PRIOR TO COLLAPSE, EMAILS SHOW
On Saturday evening, five people were pronounced dead and the rescue area was clouded by fire and smoke, though it was quickly extinguished by the end of the day. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was on the scene, and rescue teams from Israel have been dispatched to the area to lend a hand to the more than 130 officials attempting to locate and pull people from the rubble.
I’m joined by @GovRonDeSantis, members of the Israeli team, and all agencies on the ground. We have been briefed on the latest and will update the media and public later this morning. pic.twitter.com/U49QKmDGRq
— Daniella Levine Cava (@MayorDaniella) June 27, 2021
Questions have been raised about the cause of the collapse after the city of Surfside released a trove of records pertaining to the building’s needed repairs and structural soundness in 2018. Champlain Towers South was quoted for approximately $630,000 in electrical repairs, $254,000 in structural costs, nearly $3.2 million in remediation of the building’s facade, and $3.8 million pertaining to repairs of the garage and pool deck, according to emails from Morabito Consultants.
The correspondence also pointed to failures in “concrete structural” slabs on the pool deck and said that a lack of action could have led to extensive “deterioration.”
“The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,” the emails read.
The new records follow the public release of a report from the same construction firm that suggested “major structural damage” existed on the property in October 2018.
The “major structural damage” was in the concrete slabs below the pool deck, and there was “abundant” cracking in the columns, beams, and walls of the parking garage, which is under the 13-story building, Morabito’s report found.
In a Sunday interview, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the building, which was erected in the 1980s, had something “very, very wrong” with it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Buildings don’t fall down in America, that is a third-world phenomenon,” Burkett said.
“It’s very disturbing,” he added. “There was obviously something very, very wrong with this building, and we need to get to the bottom of it. Not today, not tomorrow, and not for a long time because our first priority and our only priority is to pull our residents out of that rubble.”
