Florida condominium collapse death toll rises to 90, with 31 missing
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[July 12, 2021]
By Peter Szekely
(Reuters) -The death toll in the collapse
of a Miami-area condominium rose to 90 on Sunday from 86, as crews
continued their grim search for human remains in the building's
wreckage, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.
Another 31 people were still "potentially unaccounted for," Levine Cava
said at a briefing.
While many are feared dead in the concrete and steel rubble of the
12-story oceanfront building in Surfside that partially collapsed in the
early morning hours of June 24, some of the missing have been discovered
through detective work, she said.
The "unaccounted for" list shrank by 12 from Saturday, even as only four
additional bodies were discovered.
"Our detectives are continuing to make progress in their audit and their
diligent efforts of researching, verifying all reports on the
unaccounted list and working with the families to open missing person
police reports," Levine Cava said.

With no survivors rescued from the ruins since the first few hours after
the collapse, officials last week declared that their search effort had
switched from rescue to recovery.
Working around the clock with only a few safety-related pauses, Levine
Cava said, workers have removed 14 million pounds (6,350 tonnes) of
concrete and debris from the site.
The debris pile, which once stood four to five stories high, has been
reduced to below-ground level in some spots where workers are seeing
cars in the underground parking garage, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett
said.
As search teams sift gingerly through the wreckage, they have kept an
eye out for personal items that are being cataloged and returned to
victims' families, Burkett said.
"The work is still so delicate that we've even found unbroken wine
bottles in the rubble and recovered them," he added.
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A man places flowers on a makeshift memorial for the victims of the
Surfside's Champlain Towers South condominium collapse in Miami,
Florida, U.S., July 8, 2021. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Investigators have not determined what caused part of
the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South to fall apart without
warning. Attention has been focused on a 2018 engineering report
that warned of structural deficiencies.
The local prosecutor, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, said last week
that a sitting grand jury agreed to "look into how we can prevent
such a disaster from occurring again" in coastal area buildings,
with its findings to be presented in a report.
The work of a Dade County grand jury led to building code
improvements after Hurricane Andrew devastated the area in 1992, she
added.
The collapse has already prompted reviews of other buildings. Last
week, residents of the nearby Crestview Towers condominium were told
to leave after engineers found serious concrete and electrical
problems. On Saturday, they were given 15 minutes to retrieve
personal items.
Tests of Champlain Towers North, a nearby sister building of the
doomed condominium, have found that its concrete is "at or beyond
the levels that it should be," Burkett said.
(Reporting by Peter Szekely)
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