The death toll after last week’s catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Florida, continued rising Wednesday, and now stands at 18.
Search crews going through the ruins of the condo tower pulled six more bodies from the rubble Wednesday, the highest one-day toll since the building collapsed almost a week ago into a heap of broken concrete.
The city of North Bay Village, Florida, confirmed the mother of Police Chief Carlos Noriega, Hilda Noriega, was the latest victim to be pulled from the rubble and identified.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the county is working to audit the list of the missing in an effort to remove duplicate names and provide more accurate data.
“We are sifting through all this information,” she said Tuesday. “This is a slow and methodical process.”
Going forward, Levine Cava said authorities would separate the number of dead from those accounted for, which were previously combined. She added that rescue crews continued working to find victims.
“They have been working nonstop as you know for six days,” she said.
President Joe Biden will visit Surfside and the site of the condo collapse on Thursday.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also spoke about the magnitude of the tragedy and its global impact Tuesday, saying it has been “very heartbreaking.” He said the victims whose lives have been lost and those still missing are “invariably incredibly special people” who have touched others “all across the world.”
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.
“There are two areas of (possible storm) development out in the Atlantic, heading to the Caribbean. We have eight urban rescue teams in Florida. We talked about doing a relief,” Guthrie said at a news conference Tuesday night. “We have all the resources we need but we’re going to bring in another team. We want to rotate those out so we can get more resources out.”
Rescue crews continued digging a large trench through the rubble of the collapsed 136-unit Surfside condo tower. They used heavy equipment to create the trench, which is described to be 125 feet long, 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep. It was created for two purposes.
One of the reasons is to let rescuers search for survivors in other parts of the pile with their dogs, cameras, sonar and infrared technology. It was also part of an effort to combat a “deep” fire that the county’s mayor, Levine Cava, described over the weekend as “hampering” search efforts.
Levine Cava said the smoke was the “biggest barrier” for the search-and-rescue mission. She said crews worked nonstop under the rubble to stop it, using infrared red technology, foam, water and other tactics to contain the fire and minimize the smoke, which had spread through the pile.
On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said 3 million pounds of concrete have been removed from the site of the condo collapse but there are still barriers to progress in the search efforts. He said rescue workers are not going back into the west section of the building facing Collins Avenue that is still standing because it is too dangerous, and he also said that they cannot enter a large area under the rubble on the eastern side because of the same risk.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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