Just under two weeks after a condo collapsed in Surfside, Florida, emergency workers said Wednesday they are shifting from a search and rescue mission to a recovery mission. The move all but ends the hope of finding any more survivors.
No one has been pulled out alive since the first hours after the Champlain Towers South building fell.
Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told families at a private briefing, crews would remove the rescue dogs and sound devices. However, crews would still search through the rubble for bodies. “Our sole responsibility at this point is to bring closure,” Jadallah said.
For the last two weeks, officials focused on finding survivors. Hope rekindled after workers demolished the remainder of the building. This allowed rescuers access to new areas of the huge debris pile. The hope was crews might find “voids,” or open pockets in the rubble where someone could have survived.
Some of those voids did exist, mostly in the basement and the parking garage. But instead of finding survivors there, crews recovered more than a dozen additional victims.
Families have slowly begun bracing themselves for the news their relatives did not survive.
“For some, what they’re telling us it’s almost a sense of relief when they already know (that someone has died) and they can just start to put an end to that chapter and start to move on,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue firefighter and paramedic Maggie Castro said. She has been updating families daily at private briefings.
Because the building fell in the overnight hours, many victims were found in their beds. The death toll as of Wednesday was 54, with 86 people unaccounted for.
Rescue workers suspended their mission twice: once because of the instability of the remaining part of the building and once for the demolition.
Authorities are launching a grand jury investigation into the collapse. At least six lawsuits have been filed by Champlain Towers families.
