Miami building collapse - updates: Death toll reaches 12 as extra rescue team requested amid tropical forecast

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday that President Joe Biden believes there should be an investigation of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida.

“Certainly, we want to play any constructive role we can play with federal resources in getting to the bottom of it and preventing it from happening in the future,” she said.

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio told CBS’s Face the Nation that he has “little doubt we will know why this happened,” referring to the condo tower collapse in Surfside.

He added that he also thought lawmakers would be “able to make changes to building codes as necessary to prevent it from happening again”.

“This is unusual, right?” he said. “This has never happened before. We hope it never happens again. It shouldn’t happen again. This doesn’t happen anywhere.”

He added that he understands why those living in similar buildings in the area “would be concerned”.

The CEO of global structural engineering and disaster management firm Miyamoto International, Dr Kit Miyamoto, told MSNBC that “this type of collapse is extremely rare. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of buildings collapse or damage but they’re always by earthquakes. And even if there’s an earthquake tremor like that, buildings usually don’t collapse”.

“This type of building collapse happened for probably many different reasons,” he added.

He also urged residents to alert engineers if they see rust or cracks in the walls of their buildings.

Search-and-rescue workers have dug a large trench through the rubble of the collapsed building. Using heavy equipment, crews dug a ditch 125 feet long, 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep.

This has been done to allow workers to search for possible survivors in other areas of the mound of debris – using dogs, sonar, cameras, and infrared technology, The Miami Herald reported.

It was also done to fight a “deep” fire in the rubble that Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said was “hampering” the work of the rescue crews during the weekend.

The fire has since been put out.

Family members of the missing people buried in the rubble of the collapsed condo tower in Surfside were able to visit the site after spending four days in a hotel.

Some of the relatives screamed into the rubble from 30 yards away, hoping for their loved ones to hear them, The Miami New Times reported.

“We want to scream so they can hear our voices,” one family member said on Saturday as they requested to visit the site of the collapsed tower.

Starting at 2pm on Sunday, officials brought family members to a hotel north of the site.

“You want to scream, you want to yell, you want to cry, you want to put your anger at us, do so,” Assistant Miami-Dade Fire Chief Ray Jadallah told the families, according to the paper.

“Understand what you may see, remember this is an active scene,” he said. “You may see — I just have to prepare you — you may see a victim, you may see human remains... you may see some horrible items.”

“We continue to hear sounds and, I can’t emphasize enough, it’s not voices,” Mr Jadallah said. “It could be a tap, it could be a scratch, it could be the metal contorting underneath the rubble. It’s not anybody yelling or anything like that.”

Debbie Wassermann Schultz, the Democratic Rep for Florida’s 23rd District that includes Surfside, said on Monday that a “preliminary investigation” was taking place “to determine whether or not” to “open up a full investigation”.

“I would expect that it’s natural that they would decide to do that,” she told reporters.

She said a full investigation would be “triggered” when investigators understand “whether or not any decisions and fact-finding that they engage in as a result of that investigation could have longer-term implications and recommendations for how we change federal oversight, federal law related to building construction and the kind of code enforcement decisions that will have to be made on the ground”.

She added that the US has “structures like this” all over its coastlines.

She said that “a long-term investigation” would provide lawmakers with the opportunity to “be able to implement and adapt changes in federal law that will help them make sure that when structures are built, that something like this could never happen again”.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said during a press conference on Monday that he had come across a young girl, 11 or 12 years old, sitting alone near the site of tower collapse.

He had seen her earlier, with one of her parents, and had spoken to them at the time. Mr Burkett said the other parent was one of the over 150 people still missing.

He said he asked the girl if she was OK. “She said, ‘Yes,’” the mayor said and added that she was reading a Jewish prayer on her phone.

“And that really brought it home to me,” Mr Burkett said. “She wasn’t crying, she was just lost. She didn’t know what to do, what to say, who to talk to.”

“I am going to find her, and I am going to tell her that we’re all here for her and we are going to do the best we can to bring out that parent,” the mayor added.

“It’s horrific,” he said. “This is disturbing, but that is just a tiny, tiny example of the impact that this collapse has had on our community.”

The mayor of Surfside, Charles Burkett, told ABC News that “buildings don’t fall down in America,” and adding that “there was something obviously very, very wrong with this building”.

He added that buildings collapsing were a “third world phenomenon”.

While he said they would get to bottom of what has happened, he added that “our first priority, and our only priority, is to pull our residents out of that rubble and reunite them with their family who understandably are out of their minds with emotions, sadness, anger,” and confusion, wanting to know what’s happening.

Speaking about the search-and-rescue operation, he said: “We don’t have a resource problem, we’ve had a luck problem – we just need to get a little more lucky right now.”

Officials have so far identified eight of the ten individuals confirmed to have died in the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida.

A further 151 remain unaccounted for amid the rubble of the 12-story beachfront condo, which collapsed in the middle of the night on Thursday without warning.

The eight identified are Stacie Dawn Fang, Manuel LaFont, Antonio and Gladys Lozano, Christina Beatriz Elvira, Luis Bermudez, Leon Oliwkowicz, and Anna Ortiz, according to Miami-Dade officials.

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