UNSAFE RECOVERY CONDITIONS SPUR SURFSIDE CONDO DEMOLITION

Carl Juste/Miami Herald via AP

Rubble and debris of the Champlain Towers South condo can be seen Tuesday, July 6, 2021 in Surfside, Fla.

With the demolition of what was left of the Surfside, Fla., Champlain Towers South condominium building after its partial collapse June 24, search and rescue efforts at the site have resumed with ever more urgency.

The likelihood of finding survivors under the rubble continues to diminish with each passing hour 12 days after the disaster occurred, and Tropical Storm Elsa, though not likely to hit the site head on, threatens to challenge crews with downpours and possible tornadoes.

At a morning news conference on July 6, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said that another four bodies were recovered from the condo collapse in Surfside, pushing the confirmed death toll to 32 people. Another 113 people remain unaccounted for since the building’s massive structural failure in the middle of the night nearly two weeks ago.

Of the 113 missing, “only around 70 of those are people we have been able to confirm were in fact in the building during the collapse,” Cava added.

Despite the grim news, she and other local officials have not given up hope of finding people alive in the condo building rubble.

Lightning forced rescuers to pause their work for two hours early July 6, Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told the Associated Press. In addition, stiff winds of 20 mph, accompanied with strong gusts, hampered efforts to move heavy debris with cranes.

“Active search and rescue continued throughout the night, and these teams continue through extremely adverse and challenging conditions,” Cava remarked to reporters.

The AP reported that power saws and backhoes could be heard as workers in yellow helmets and blue jumpsuits searched the rubble. All the while, gray clouds from Elsa’s outer bands swirled above.

The storm’s worst weather was expected to bypass Surfside and neighboring Miami as Elsa strengthened before making landfall somewhere on Florida’s west coast south of Tampa Bay and continuing into the northern part of the state.

Officials noted that search crews can work through rain, but lightning from unrelated thunderstorms is much more hazardous to rescuers and to contractors brought to the site to remove the building’s debris.

“We’re actively searching as aggressively as we can,” Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said at the news briefing.

As search crews have pulled more bodies from the wreckage, they have detected no new signs of survivors, he added.

“We are not seeing anything positive,” Cominsky explained.

Workers have been freed to search a broader area since the unstable remaining portion of the condo building was demolished amid fears that the structure could fall without warning, according to an AP news report. Officials said the demolition gave rescuers access to previously inaccessible places, including bedrooms where people were believed to be sleeping at the time of the disaster.

“We’re now at 100 percent full strength, full-on pulling everybody out of that rubble pile,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told CNN.

Hoping to bring answers to the families of the missing, rescue teams have been working endlessly to break through 13 to 16 ft. of the concrete that came crashing down as many residents slept June 24.

Unsafe Conditions Leads to Implosion

The recovery operations were halted early July 1, one week after the building’s unexplained failure, after engineers saw signs that the remaining portion of the structure could crumble and fall onto rescuers and accident investigators.

CNN reported later that day that a large column was found to be “swaying six to 12 inches” that could damage a super column in the garage. On top of that, officials said that “a concrete slab on the south side of the tower was moving” along with a pile of rubble.

As a result, authorities quickly cleared people from the area around the rescue operation.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that state engineers were helping Miami-Dade Fire Rescue get “different options on

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