As condo death toll rises, officials vow to keep up search despite fading hopes

The official death toll in the collapse of a Miami-area condominium tower rose to 12 Tuesday, as officials vowed to press ahead with rescue operations for the 149 still missing, even as hoped dimmed for finding anyone alive in the mountain of rubble where the building once stood.

On the sixth day of a painstaking search for survivors under the collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South, Governor Ron DeSantis evoked a well-known military commitment to leave no one behind on the battlefield and pledged to do the same for the people still missing in the rubble.

“The way I look at it, as an old Navy guy, is when somebody is missing in action, in the military, you’re missing until you’re found. We don’t stop the search,” DeSantis said at a news conference.

“I think that’s what is happening. Those first responders are breaking their backs trying to find anybody they can. I think they are going to continue to do that. They’ve been very selfless. They’ve put themselves at risk to do it.”

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Tuesday evening that “very unfortunately one additional victim was recovered,” increasing the death toll to 12.

Work at the site has been deliberate and treacherous. Debris fell onto the search area overnight from the shattered edge of the part of the building that still stands. That forced rescuers to mark a “don’t go beyond here” line and focus their efforts on parts of the debris pile that are farther from the structure, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told Miami television station WSVN.

The pancake collapse of the building left layer upon layer of intertwined debris, frustrating efforts to reach anyone who may have survived in a pocket of space.

“There are currently 210 people working on the site. The urban search and rescue team has been augmented by teams from all over the state and all over the world,” Levine Cava said earlier in the day.

“They are working throughout inclement weather. They are working as hard as they ever have.”

Kevin Guthrie of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said his agency requested an additional search team. He said state officials want to rotate some of their teams out so they can be on hand in case of severe weather in the coming days.

Several members of an Israeli rescue team worked partly on hands and knees Tuesday over a small section of the rubble, digging with shovels, pickaxes and saws. They removed debris into buckets that were dumped into a metal construction bin, which was periodically lifted away by a crane. The crane then delivered an empty bin.

Late in the afternoon, rescue officials sounded a horn for a second time during the day’s work, signaling an approaching storm with lightning. Workers temporarily evacuated.

The outlook has nevertheless grown increasingly grim, with no one emerging alive from the rubble since the immediate aftermath of the disaster on early Thursday morning.

Rescuers who arrived in the moments after the tower came down helped evacuate dozens of residents, and pulled one teenage boy alive from the rubble.

“It was like an earthquake,” said Janette Aguero, who escaped from the tower’s 11th floor with her family.

Authorities have faced mounting anger in the days since the disaster from friends and family who have received no further news of loved ones feared trapped beneath the wreckage.

“No one is giving up hope here. … We are dedicated to getting everyone out of that pile of rubble,” said Burkett.

He cited the case of a woman who was found alive 17 days after a garment factory collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Rachel Spiegel, whose 66-year-old mother, Judy Spiegel, is missing, said Tuesday that she was hoping for a miracle, but she also wrote about looking beyond the tragedy.

“Our mom Judy was the glue that kept our family together. All of the family mementos, photos, clothing and heirlooms our father and mother have collected over the past 65 years were lost in a matter of seconds,” Spiegel wrote in a message about setting up a fund for charities on behalf of her mother. “As we continue to search for meaning in this catastrophe, we must also look to the future and rebuild.”

In a text message exchange, she added, “Please keep praying for a miracle.”

Authorities meet frequently with families to explain what they’re doing and to answer questions. They have discussed how DNA matches are made to help identify the dead, how next-of-kin will be contacted and explained in “extreme detail” how they are searching the mound, the mayor said.

With that knowledge, Levine Cava said, families are coming to their own conclusions.

“Some are feeling more hopeful, some less hopeful, because we do not have definitive answers. We give them the facts. We take them to the site,” she said. “They have seen the operation. They understand now how it works, and they are preparing themselves for news, one way or the other.”

Friends and neighbors of the building’s occupants held a vigil on a nearby beach on Monday evening, clutching white roses and sobbing as a facilitator burned incense and played a gong.

Glow sticks and dirt laid on the sand spelled out the word “HOPE,” while down the coast at the ruins of the apartment block, the sound of rescuers’ power tools carried on through the night.

Martin Langesfeld, whose sister, 26-year-old Nicole Langesfeld, is missing in the collapse, expressed hope that there are still survivors.

“We’re not alone in this. There’s hope. I really believe miracles do happen,” he said during the vigil. “Things like this have happened around the world.”