Three weeks after rescue crews began searching for victims, officials said they were nearing the end of their search for those trapped in the ruins of the Champlain Towers South condo building, a somber bookend to one of the deadliest such collapses in U. S. history. In total, 97 people have been confirmed dead — young couples, entire families and retirees whose footprints stretched across multiple continents. No survivors had been found since the initial hours after the collapse. A Miami-Dade police spokesman said that as of Thursday, 97 missing reports had been confirmed, a number equal to the dead. Nonetheless, authorities stopped short of saying all victims had been located. Ninety people have been identified, and there remains the possibility that one or more victims were never officially reported missing. Police spokesman Alvaro Zabaleta said the search for any other possible victims would continue until crews have reached the bottom of the debris pile.“They’re almost at the bottom to be able to say, we’ve reached rock bottom, we’ve searched every inch of this property and that’s when we say, ‘Okay, we’re done,’ ” Zabaleta told The Washington Post, noting that it was difficult to say how much longer that could take. Though officials initially feared that more than 150 people could be trapped beneath the rubble, that number declined as detectives found some people safe and realized other names had been reported twice, sometimes in both Hebrew and English. As the search approaches its conclusion, families are shifting to holding funerals while investigators piece together what caused the building to collapse. By Wednesday, 22 million pounds of debris and concrete had been moved. Responders were safeguarding jewelry, photo albums and other personal items in hopes of connecting them to relatives.“Plates you can replace, a vase you can replace,” Rabbi Yossi Harlig, the Miami-Dade police chaplain, said recently. “But a holy book or tallit [a prayer shawl] or tefillin [a case containing Torah texts for weekday morning prayers] or something that was in the family that was passed from generation to generation, those are things you want to make sure you can get back.”The rescue mission was fraught with difficulties from day one: Crews searching through the rubble repeatedly had to pause their quest to find survivors as storms, fires and the unstable remains of the tower threatened their safety. Families were left not knowing whether to hold out hope or begin to grieve — an in-between that one expert calls “ambiguous loss.”Each emotional news conference from officials shed light on the people who died at Champlain Towers South. The building’s population, which included Latin American immigrants and Orthodox Jews, reflected the Miami area’s international appeal. Family members visited the site, some yelling out in agony the names of their loved ones, as they waited for answers.
All data is taken from the source: http://washingtonpost.com
Article Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/15/surfside-condo-collapse-victims-recovered/
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