Wednesday 07 July 2021
Little hope after the house collapses
Florida death toll rises to 46
A twelve-story residential building in Florida partially collapsed two weeks ago. During search work, emergency services are now recovering more and more corpses, the number of dead rises to 46. There is hardly any hope of finding survivors.
Around two weeks after the partial collapse of a high-rise apartment building in Florida, the number of confirmed fatalities has risen to 46. The authorities said ten more bodies were recovered from the rubble of the building in the nearby Miami city of Surfside. 94 people are still missing. There is virtually no hope of finding survivors in the rubble.
The authorities feared that the search work would have to be interrupted because of the tropical storm “Elsa”. “Elsa” landed on Florida’s west coast on the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday. Surfside is located on the Atlantic coast in east Florida and was thus spared the tropical storm.
At the weekend, the remains of the partially collapsed residential high-rise in Surfside were blown up in a controlled manner. Due to the tropical storm that had meanwhile turned into a hurricane, the remains of the building were also threatened with collapse.
The residential complex with around 130 residential units collapsed on June 24 for reasons that were still unclear. Since then, detection dogs, special cameras and heavy equipment have been used to search for victims practically around the clock. The exact cause of the accident is still unknown. However, in 2018 an expert report had already found “major structural damage” to the building, which was completed in 1981.
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