President Joe Biden is calling for a federal investigation into last week’s deadly Miami-area condo collapse, which has now officially claimed 10 lives and left more than 150 missing.
“The goal, of course, is to get to the bottom of what happened,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.
Officials on Monday raised the death toll to 10, as rescue workers continued a fifth day in the search for any remaining survivors in the Surfside, Florida, collapsed condo building.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the remains of another person was retrieved from the rubble of the condominium. The unidentified remains join those of four others recovered on Sunday, and four others recovered late last week, as well as one person who was removed from the collapse but later died at a local hospital.
A total of 151 more than 150 people are still missing, while Cava said 134 have been accounted for.
Early Monday, a crane lifted a large slab of concrete from the debris pile, enabling about 30 rescuers in hard hats to move in and carry smaller pieces of debris into red buckets, which are emptied into a larger bin for a crane to remove. The work has been complicated by intermittent rain showers moving through the area, but at least the fires that hampered the initial search have been extinguished.
Andy Alvarez, a deputy incident commander with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday that rescuers have been able to find some voids inside the wreckage, mostly in the basement and parking garage areas.
“We have over 80 rescuers at a time that are breaching the walls that collapsed, in a frantic effort to try to rescue those that are still viable and to get to those voids that we typically know exist in these buildings,” Alvarez said.
“We have been able to tunnel through the building,” Alvarez added. “This is a frantic search to seek that hope, that miracle, to see who we can bring out of this building alive.”
He said rescuers, like the families, are still hoping for good news. “You’ve gotta have hope and you’ve gotta have faith,” he said.
Late Saturday, four of the victims were identified, as Stacie Dawn Fang, 54; Antonio Lozano, 83, and Gladys Lozano, 79; and Manuel LaFont, 54.
The mayor said the identification of three bodies had dropped the number of people unaccounted for down to 156, and crews also discovered other unspecified human remains. The remains are being sent to the medical examiner, and authorities are gathering DNA samples from family members to aid in identification.
A video posted online showed an official briefing families. When he said they had found remains among the rubble, people began sobbing.
The Paramount Miami Worldcenter tower in downtown Miami was also lit with the words “One World, One Prayer.” Organizers plan to light up the condo building with the message every night for two minutes on the hour until all victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse are accounted for.
Also late Saturday, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said a city official had led a cursory review of the nearby Champlain Towers North and Champlain Towers East buildings but “didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”
The news came after word of a 2018 engineering report that showed the building, which was built in 1981, had “major structural damage” to a concrete slab below its pool deck that needed extensive repairs, part of a series of documents released by the city of Surfside.
Further documentation showed the estimated cost of the repairs would total over $9 million. That included more than $3.8 million for garage, entrance and pool remediation and nearly $3.2 million for fixes to the exterior façade.
While officials said no cause for the collapse early Thursday has been determined, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said a “definitive answer” was needed in a timely manner.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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