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

Rescue workers in Miami are still hopeful they can locate survivors amidst the towering pile of rubble that was once the Champlain Tower South in Surfside, Florida.

The condo complex collapsed five days ago, leaving nearly more than 150 people unaccounted for and at least ten dead.

Over the weekend four more bodies were found by rescuers, but so the only survivors found were pulled from the wreckage shortly after the collapse.

Rescuers have utilised heavy machinery and dogs in their search, and structural engineers have been on-site to help with the recovery.

Much of the rescue operations have taken place beneath the structure, where flooding has resulted in rescuers having to tread through waist-high waters to try to find survivors.

Members of the international nonprofit group of volunteers named Cadena are part of the search-and-rescue effort taking place in Surfside, Florida.

The group, which is trained in Israel, has taken part in rescue work following over 1,000 natural disasters and humanitarian crises in 26 countries since it was founded in 2005, the group’s director of international emergencies, Erika Glanz, told The Miami Herald.

“I personally know four of the missing people,” she said.

Moises Soffer, 36, has been a member of Cadena for five years and has been working at the site of the collapsed building since Friday with a dog trained to find living people in disaster scenarios.

“The people are doing their best,” Mr Soffer told The Herald. “The structure was unstable, and that’s why it took time to start working.”

Jason Borden, a structural engineer who inspected the garage in the collapsed condo tower last year, told CNN that he “saw cracks in the stucco facade” and “deterioration of the concrete balconies”.

“I saw cracks and deterioration of the garage and plaza level, but those are all things that we’re accustomed to seeing,” Mr Borden added.

“There could have been construction errors or design errors or design defects. There was maintenance or repairs that needed to be performed. You know, all of those things together likely contributed to what happened here,” he said.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, said it was the largest deployment of such resources in Florida history that was not due to a hurricane. He said the same number of people were on the ground in Surfside as during Hurricane Michael, a devastating Category 5 hurricane that hit 12 counties in 2018.

“They’re working around the clock,” Patronis said. “They’re working 12 hours at a time, midnight to noon to midnight.” - AP

A contractor who visited the Champlain Towers South two days before its collapse took photos of the basement-level garage that showed cracks in the concrete, wet floors and exposed and corroding rebar.

The commercial pool contractor who was putting together a bid for part of the pool’s cosmetic restoration and new equipment told The Miami Herald he was struck by the lack of maintenance.

“There was standing water all over the parking garage,” he said. “I thought to myself, that’s not normal.”

He took photos of the exposed rebar in the concrete and told his boss the job would be more complicated than expected, possibly needing to remove pipes for concrete restoration.

He added: “I wonder if this was going on in other parts of the building and caused this collapse,” he said.

A former Surfside official who told residents the collapsed Miami building was "in very good shape" says he doesn’t remember receiving an engineer’s report that warned of "major structural damage".

While minutes of a 2018 meeting obtained by NPR said town official Ross Prieto reviewed the structural engineering report, he told The Miami Herald he didn’t recall the report or emails from a condo board member who sent it to him.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Mr Preto reportedly said. “That’s 2018.”

He declined to comment on the 2018 board meeting citing the advice of an attorney, the Herald reported.

Justin Willis, a University of Connecticut baseball player, told the Hartford Courant he was playing videogames when he “felt like a first gust of wind from a storm”.

The building began to shake and then intensified to feel “kind of like [Hurricane] Sandy, the way I remember it. It kind of seemed normal for the moment”.

“Then the third one felt like a jet took off right on top of our building. I was expecting to see a plane come right over our balcony,” he said.

He emerged from the apartment to see the neighbouring apartment was gone.

“The crazy part was looking in the hallway to our left,” he added. “Me and my sister in the living room were probably the closest, were maybe 15 feet away from where the building ended up just breaking off. It just gives you a new sense.

The nine-page “Structural Field Survey Report“ from Morabito Consultants was sent to Champlain Towers South treasurer Maggie Manrara on 8 October, according to emails released by the Town of Surfside.

The emails show board member Mara Chouela sent that report, along with a mechanical and electrical engineering report by Thomas E Henz, to Ross Prieto on 13 November, two days before a meeting between the town and building residents.

The minutes of that meeting reported by NPR said: “Structural engineer report was reviewed by Mr Prieto. It appears the building is in very good shape.”

An email from Mr Prieto to former town manager Guillermo Olmedillo said the meeting went “very well”.

Morabito Consultants said in a statement that after providing estimates in 2018, the condo association engaged the firm again in June 2020.

William Espinosa, who says he oversaw the Champlain Towers South condo maintenance staff from 1995 to 2000, told CBS Miami he worried about the amount of seawater in the underground garage.

“Any time that we had high tides away from the ordinary, any King Tide or anything like that, we would have a lot of saltwater come in through the bottom of the of the foundation,” he said.

“But it was so much water, all the time, that the pumps never could keep up with it.”

The comment about pump are similar to what a commercial pool contractor told The Miami Herald after visiting the building two days before its collapse.

There to quote repairs, the contractor said a condo staff member told him the standing water throughout the basement parking garage and the pool equipment room had to be pumped so frequently that the building had to replace pump motors every two years.

“He thought it was waterproofing issues,” the contractor told the Herald. “I thought to myself, that’s not normal.”

Miami-Dade Police Department is scheduled to give an evening update press briefing.