Authorities fear scores of people could have died after a beachfront condo building partially collapsed early on Thursday in the town of Surfside near Miami, Florida.
NBC reported "Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said 102 people have been accounted for and 99 are unaccounted for following the collapse. Officials stressed that ‘unaccounted for’ didn't necessarily mean those people were in the building at the time of the collapse. Authorities were taking DNA samples from the family members of those missing."
Levine said she had spoken to President Joe Biden, who offered the full support of the federal government to assist in the search for survivors. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency to allow allocation of federal resources to aid in the search for survivors.
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett confirmed to NBC that at least one person had died in the accident. He warned the building was at risk of further collapse. "The building is literally pancaked, it has gone down, and I mean there's just feet in between stories where there were 10 feet. That is heartbreaking because it doesn't mean to me that we're gonna be as successful as we would want to be to find people alive," Burkett was quoted as saying by NBC.
The ill-fated Champlain Towers South Condo was built in 1981 and was reported to be 12 stories high with more than 130 units.
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Officials said investigations were continuing into the cause of the building collapse. CNN quoted an expert as saying the building had been at risk of 'sinking' in the 1990s. "Shimon Wdowinski, a professor with Florida International University’s Institute of Environment, told CNN he determined in a study last year that the Champlain Towers South condo showed signs of sinking in the 1990s. The condo had a subsidence rate of about two millimeters a year from 1993 to 1999, according to his study. While Wdowinski said that this sinking alone would likely not cause the condo’s collapse, he said it could be a contributing factor," CNN reported.
