Death toll rises to 16 in Florida condo collapse

(File photo) Nearly half of the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South condo to crumple as residents slept in the early hours of last Thursday.

Another four bodies were found overnight in the shattered ruins of a collapsed Miami-area condominium tower, the mayor of Miami-Dade County said yesterday, bringing the confirmed death toll to 16 nearly a week after the building fell. Nobody has been pulled alive from the mounds of pulverised concrete, splintered lumber and twisted metal since the early hours of the disaster, with 147 people still unaccounted for. Officials said they still harbour hope of finding survivors. “We are doing everything humanly possible, and then some, to get through this tragedy and we are doing it together,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference yesterday, where she was joined by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Investigators have not concluded what caused nearly half of the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South condo to crumple as residents slept in the early hours of last Thursday. But a 2018 engineer’s report on the 12-floor, 136-unit complex, prepared ahead of a building safety recertification process, found structural deficiencies. As recently as April, the condo association’s president warned residents in a letter that severe concrete damage identified by the engineer around the base of the building had since grown “significantly worse”. Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said that she would convene a special grand jury, apart from any potential criminal investigation, to examine building safety and “what steps we can take to safeguard our residents” from similar disasters in the future.