The man who commanded a U.S. Army special forces team after the 2010 Haiti earthquake says search and rescue operations in Surfside, Florida, could last for weeks, as more bodies continue being recovered after the catastrophic Champlain Towers South partial collapse.
“Moving from a search and rescue mode into a recovery mode is a difficult decision to make,” said Ken Keen, a retired lieutenant general who spent 38 years in the Army and now is an associate dean at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “You’re sending a strong signal that you’re past the point of rescuing anyone left in the rubble.
“In Haiti, it was around the three-week point when we went truly from search and rescue to recovery.”
Four more bodies were reported Wednesday in the rubble, raising the death toll in the disaster to 16 people.
Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah said rescuers have been able to build a ramp for a crane to reach areas at the top of the pile they had not been access before.
Moving into a recovery phase “will be a well-thought-out decision,” Keen, who spent more than 11 years working and living abroad in the Panama, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, Germany, Egypt and Pakistan, said. “In Haiti, we rescued an 8-year-old girl about eight days after the quake. An elderly woman, around 80, was rescued 10 days afterward, and we’ve seen cases of survivors who were found even after a longer period than that.”
The discovery of the bodies came the morning after Florida authorities asked the federal government for an additional rescue team to comb the rubble of the tower, a request that underscored the strenuous nature of the open-ended search for survivors in an area prone to tropical weather.
The possibility that severe weather in coming days could further stretch Florida’s search and rescue resources prompted state officials to ask the federal government for the additional team, Kevin Guthrie of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said Tuesday. Already, intermittent bad weather has caused temporary delays in the search.
Guthrie said the new team, which would likely come from Virginia, would be on hand if severe weather hits the area in coming days and allow crews that have been working at the site for days to rotate out. Authorities said it’s still a search-and-rescue operation, but no one has been found alive since hours after the collapse on Thursday.
The National Hurricane Center says two disorganized storm systems in the Atlantic have a chance of becoming tropical systems in the coming days, but it is unclear at this point whether they would pose a threat to the U.S.
Charles Cyrille of the Miami-Dade County Office of Emergency said 900 workers from 50 federal, state and local agencies were working seamlessly on the search.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said that she and her staff will meet with engineering, construction and geology experts, among others, to review building safety issues and develop recommendations “to ensure a tragedy like this will never, ever happen again.”
Keen said search and rescue teams “won’t stop until they’re sure everyone who’s missing has been recovered. Decisions like these are made by professionals who do this type of work for a living. As long as they’re finding tunnels and spaces where people may be found, they will remain in search and rescue mode.”
Authorities say they have no plans to halt rescue efforts they say are unprecedented for an emergency in Florida aside from a hurricane response. More than 400 workers from across the state and from Israel and Mexico have joined the crusade.
Usually six or seven squads, each with six members, rotate in and out every 45 minutes during 12-hour shifts. They already have moved over 3 million pounds of concrete rubble, officials said.
With relatives imploring the rescuers to increase the pace, the dangerous work has persisted through rainstorms and sweltering heat.
“It is such painstaking, grueling work,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said. “They live to save lives.”
While there have been no sight or sounds of survivors since the hours immediately following the destruction, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett insisted: “Nobody’s giving up hope here. Nobody’s stopping.”
Burkett cited the case of a woman who was found alive 17 days after a garment factory collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Added Gov. Ron DeSantis: “You’re missing until you’re found. We don’t stop the search.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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