The official death toll in the Miami -area condominium collapse rose to at least nine people, officials announced Sunday morning, as rescue crews supplemented by …
The official death toll in the Miami -area condominium collapse rose to at least nine people, officials announced Sunday morning, as rescue crews supplemented by federal and state resources, as well as teams from Mexico and Israel, continued to search through the rubble. The mayor of Surfside, Fla. stressed Sunday that the first priority of rescue crews is to those building occupants who remain unaccounted for and reunite them with their families – as the cause of the 12-story building collapse remains unclear four days later. Alternate housing will be provided for residents in a sister building as an „army of engineers“ is set to set to begin a „top to bottom“ review of its infrastructure. „Our first priority and our only priority is to pull our residents out of that rubble and reunite them with their family who are understandably out of their minds with emotion, sadness, anger and just confused and want to know what’s happening,“ Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told ABC’s „This Week.“ „Our duty is to continue to do our jobs, which is to find their loved ones and reunited them.“ What caused Champlain Towers South to collapse remains unclear, though Burkett, speaking to ABC, compared the 30-foot pile of pancaked concrete and mangled metal that rescuers continued to comb through for survivors as similar tedious rescue efforts that happened after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. „Buildings don’t fall down in America. That is a third-world phenomenon,“ Burkett said. „The last time we saw something like this — well we had two sections of building fall down pancake style separately, and then you saw the fire. It’s very reminiscent of something we’ve seen in New York. It’s very disturbing. There was something obviously very, very wrong in this building and we need to get to the bottom of it.
