Search and rescue workers at the site of the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfside, Fla., found one body and other human remains on Saturday evening, bringing the death toll to five, with 156 people still unaccounted for, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade County, has said.
Late Saturday night, the Miami-Dade Police Department identified three of the victims as Antonio Lozano, 83, and Gladys Lozano, 79, of Apartment 903; and Manuel LaFont of Apartment 804.
Erika Benitez, a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade Fire Department, said Saturday morning that it had been a while since rescue workers had heard sounds that they believed could be indicators of people still alive beneath the rubble.
The deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium building near Miami has raised questions about the safety of similar buildings along South Florida’s beaches, where salt air tends to eat away at steel and concrete structures.
On Saturday morning, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade County announced a 30-day audit of all buildings 40 years and older under the county’s jurisdiction. She urged other Florida cities to do the same with buildings within their borders.
The collapsed building, which was in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, was about to undergo repairs to fix “major structural problems” an engineer had identified in 2018 in a pool deck and parking garage undergirding the structure. The repairs were part of a “recertification” every building in the town must undergo at 40-year intervals.
The 40-year review was put in place after the federal Drug Enforcement Administration building collapsed in downtown Miami in 1974, killing seven people. (Engineers later blamed it on an overloaded parking garage.) Under the program, once a building reaches 40 years, a licensed engineer or architect must inspect it for structural problems and certify it is fit for occupancy.
The mayor of Surfside, Charles W. Burkett, said on Saturday that the town had received the inspection report detailing structural problems with the building by email in 2018. He said he did not know what, if any, steps were taken to examine the problems further. “Of course there should have been follow up,” he said.
On Friday, Mr. Burkett said at a town commission meeting that he did not see problems with about 20 other 12-story buildings and hotels that rise along the beach in his town. “There is not a lot of probable cause to believe that those kinds of problems could exist in the other ocean front buildings in Surfside,” he said.
(NYTimes)
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