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Firefighters announced the end of the search for dead bodies at the collapse site Florida The apartment building ended a month of hard work and cleared away the dangerous debris that had piled up several stories high.
The collapse of Champlain Tanan by the sea on June 24 killed 97 people, and at least one missing person has yet to be identified. Most of the site has been cleaned up and the rubble has been moved to the Miami warehouse. Although forensic scientists are still working, including checking debris in the warehouse, no more bodies can be found where the building once stood.
Except for a few hours after the collapse, the survivors never appeared. The search team spent several weeks battling the dangers of rubble, including shaky and unstable parts above buildings, recurring fires, and the suffocating summer heat and thunderstorms in Florida. They have gone through more than 14,000 tons of broken concrete and steel, often working piece by piece, and finally declared the task complete.
The urban search and rescue team of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Team left the disaster area in a convoy of fire trucks and other vehicles on Friday, slowly drove towards their headquarters, attended a press conference, and announced the search was officially over.
At the ceremony, Fire Chief Allen Kominsky paid tribute to the firefighters who worked 12-hour shifts while camping at the scene.
“This is obviously devastating. This is clearly an overall difficult situation,” Kominsky said. “I am extremely proud of the men and women who represent Miami-Dade Fire Rescue.”
This disaster is one of the deadliest engineering failures in the United States.
Officials declined to clarify whether they still have a group of human remains that pathologists are trying to determine, or whether they are still searching for the last group of remains. It is believed that the 98th victim is Estelle Hedaya, an outgoing 54-year-old woman who likes to travel and chats with strangers. Her brother Ikey provided DNA samples and visited the website twice to learn about his search work.
“When we entered the second month alone, without any other families, we felt helpless,” he told the Associated Press on Friday.
The collapse also sparked a race to inspect other aging residential buildings in Florida and elsewhere, and raised broader questions about the National Management Apartments Association and building safety regulations.
Soon after the collapse, it became clear that the warning about Champlain Tanan, which opened in 1981, was ignored. An engineering report in 2018 detailed the cracking and degradation of concrete support beams in underground parking lots, as well as other problems that would require nearly US$10 million to repair. Repairs did not occur, as the owner of the building’s 136 units and its management apartment committee were arguing about the cost, especially after the Surfside town inspector told them that the building was safe, which is estimated to increase to $15 million this year.
The complete collapse is almost unimaginable. As many officials said in the first few days of the disaster, a building of this size not only collapsed outside of a terrorist attack in the United States. Even tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes rarely knock them down.
In the weeks following the collapse, a 28-story courthouse (built in 1928) and two apartment buildings in downtown Miami were closed after inspectors discovered structural problems. They will remain closed until maintenance is carried out.
The first call to 911 was around 1:20 in the morning, when the residents of Chiipurang reported that the parking lot had collapsed. A woman standing on the balcony called her husband who was on a business trip and said that the swimming pool had fallen into the garage.
Then, in an instant, part of the L-shaped building fell directly. Eight seconds later, another part followed closely, with 35 people remaining in the standing part. In the first few hours, a teenager was rescued, and the firefighters believed that others might still be alive. They got hope from the noise made inside the pile that may have been knocked by the survivor, but in retrospect, the sound came from the moving debris.
The dead included members of the large Orthodox Jewish community in the area, the sister of the Paraguayan first lady, her family and their nanny, as well as a local salesman, his wife and their two young daughters.
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