The death toll from the condo collapse in Florida is up to 12 and with 150 people still missing, work continues around the clock to find survivors.
Foreign search and rescue teams from Israel and Mexico are now on the scene.
Officials say this is still a rescue mission not a recovery and the commander of Israel’s team says he’s seen the impossible happen before.
Of those still unaccounted for at the Surfside condo collapse, more than two dozen are Jewish with links to Israel.
Now an Israeli search and rescue team is on site, bringing decades of experience.
“We came because people are here, lost their families, lost their relatives, lost their loved ones and we are here as we already doing the past 35 years all over the world,” said Col. Res. Golan Vach.
The Israeli team has seen this kind of disaster before and the commander says he believes they can still find survivors.
“Most like this place, I found a man alive 10 years ago in Haiti after 100 hours and we still have hope,” he said. “But this site is very complicated and I hope that we will find somebody.”
United Hatzela, an Israeli non-profit that provides emergency medical response is also in Miami. Their psychotrauma and crisis response unit is meeting with anyone affected by the collapse.
“What we’re trying to do is, we’re basically just trying to make this process of the waiting, of the unknowing, a process where they can be active, be effective, be helpful to the search and to one another by helping providing relief to one another because they’re all going through the same thing, they’re all going through the same trauma,” said first responder Raphael Poch.
Firefighters, who also make up elite federal search and rescue teams out of Miami, were some of the first to respond.
Chief Alan Cominsky with the Miami Dade Fire Rescue Department described the scene as “horrific.”
“Just when we first arrived and what we saw. The horrific catastrophic type of collapse. Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue, we were able, during that time-frame to remove 37 individuals and we continue searching.”
The Florida Task Forces are now helping search through the rubble while looking for pockets of air or voids in the rubble where survivors could be trapped.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) says teams are working under grueling conditions with the goal of bringing victims home.
“They understand that in every one of those condos were people whose different families world revolved around them…grandmothers, grandkids, brothers and sisters,” said Gov. DeSantis. “I thank them for all of their efforts and I thank them for leaving no stone unturned. And the families, we’re gonna be there for the long haul on this.”
As investigators continue to determine a cause, The Wall Street Journal published a letter that it says was sent by the condo board’s president in April, warning that significant repairs were needed and that the building had deteriorated since a 2018 inspection.
“Indeed the observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial inspection,” the letter reads. “When you can visually see the concrete spalling (cracking), that means that the rebar holding it together is rusting and deteriorating beneath the surface.”
An engineer who studied the 9/11 Pentagon attack has been hired to inspect the collapse although it will likely be quite some time before any real questions are answered.
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