Hope fades amid frantic search for 5 workers trapped in garage rubble

Hundreds of emergency response personnel were digging through tons of rubble in Tel Aviv late Monday in a “race against time” to locate and rescue five construction workers believed buried under a collapsed parking garage.

Rescue services at the scene managed to extract two trapped people earlier on Monday evening, and the locations of the remaining five trapped construction workers “have been approximated and are being monitored,” the IDF Home Front Command said in a statement.

But Dudi Mizrahi, the head of the command’s Search and Rescue Unit, said at 8:30 p.m. that there had been no contact with any of the missing workers for more than two hours. “It’s been two or two-and-a-half hours since we had any connection” with the one trapped worker who had previously been communicating with rescuers, Mizrahi said. He said the search and rescue work could go on for days, but that “the chances of finding anyone alive” would obviously fade as the hours went by.

In all, in the course of Monday’s rescue efforts, five people were pulled from the rubble after the four-story parking garage under construction in the Ramat Hahayal neighborhood of northeast Tel Aviv collapsed suddenly Monday morning. Two people were confirmed killed and 24 more were injured.

One of the deceased was identified as a 28-year-old foreign worker from Ukraine, while the second victim “has yet to be identified,” police said.

“Firefighters, alongside other rescue workers from the Home Front Command, are in a race against time to locate the five missing trapped people as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for the fire department said.

Eyal Eizenberg, the former head of the Home Front command said that, relatively speaking, it was “a miracle” that the collapse happened now, rather than two weeks from now when the parking garage was set to open and the consequences would have been even more disastrous.

The IDF said 300 of its people were involved in the ongoing search and rescue operation, with the fire department adding another 160 rescue workers.

Col. Ariel Blitz, head of the Home Front Command’s Population Preparedness Department, told reporters the rescue workers were using every tool at their disposal to locate the missing and trapped victims, including sniffer dogs, cellphone signal detection devices and still experimental technology.

“There’s nothing that we’re using for the first time, but we’re using everything we have, including things that are still being tested. We’re not hesitating to use everything we have, even if it will help just a little bit,” Blitz told reporters.

Investigators opened a probe into what caused the cave-in, with early indications pointing to an engineering failure, according to the army and police.

The search and rescue efforts by Home Front Command police officers, firefighters, medics, doctors and soldiers were expected to last through the night and beyond.

Access to the trapped workers was complicated as the four-story parking garage is located entirely underground. “Three of the floors definitely collapsed, but at this point the fourth floor is unreachable,” police said.

“It’s a scene of destruction, obviously,” said Mizrahi. The rescuers “are facing many engineering challenges.”

While Blitz noted that every disaster site has its own difficulties and advantages, he said this underground environment presented a particularly tough challenge for rescue workers.

The disaster site was divided up into five sections, with the Home Front Command’s national search and rescue unit working on two of them and the Ram, Shachar and Tavor Battalions each taking one.

A crane and a special sand-suctioning truck were brought in to remove some 250 tons of rubble from the scene, but there was still “a lot of work being done by hand,” an official said.

Earlier, firefighters said 21 workers, both Israeli and Palestinian, were rescued or managed to stagger out of the site themselves in the first hour after the collapse.

Another three had been trapped under the structure but were rescued after firefighters dug a tunnel to them through the rubble and sand.

In total, Magen David Adom rescuers took 24 people to local hospitals, according to CEO Eli Bin. One of the workers was in serious condition at Ichilov Hospital.

The construction site, located on the corner of Habarzel and Hanehoshet streets in Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hahayal neighborhood, is still considered hazardous. The portions of the parking garage that have not collapsed “are dangerous and unstable,” according to an engineering assessment.

The victims were taken to several nearby hospitals, including Ichilov, Beilinson, Tel Hashomer and Asuta, the latter of which is located next door to the scene.

The hospitals opened an emergency hotline (dial 1255133 from any Israeli phone line) for families seeking to check if their relatives are among the injured.

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