The latest on the partial building collapse near Miami

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava speaks at a briefing on Tuesday evening.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told CNN the Florida state attorney would be calling for a grand jury to do an investigation of the Surfside collapse site, and on how a similar situation can be avoided in the future.

Levine Cava told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday that she spoke with Florida State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who is also the prosecutor for Miami-Dade County.

In a statement on Tuesday, the state attorney did not go as far, saying only, “I plan to request that our Grand Jury look at what steps we can take to safeguard our residents without jeopardizing any scientific, public safety, or potential criminal investigations.” 

Fernandez Rundle assured that she would not do anything to jeopardize the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigative findings in the process. “However, this is a matter of extreme public importance, and as the State Attorney elected to keep this community safe, I will not wait,” she added.

According to the release from Fernandez Rundle, her office deployed senior prosecutors to the disaster site to collaborate with the engineers and other investigators the morning of the collapse and sent victim specialists to the site to help grieving friends and family members.

Magaly “Maggie” Ramsey, whose mother is among the 149 people unaccounted for, said she’d like to speak with President Biden when he visits on Thursday and hopes the government can bring accountability for the “very poor decisions” that led to the building collapse.

“I would love to tell [President Biden and first lady Jill Biden] how I feel and I would like to stop this from ever happening again because I feel like some very poor decisions were made and it robbed me from saying goodbye to my mother,” Ramsey said.

She went on to describe how the loss of her mother added to the grief she already felt from losing her father to Covid-19 in August 2020.

Ramsey said she also wants answers as a way to honor her mother’s life and legacy. 

“She would want me to be patient and whatever the reasons this occurred, for that to come out,” said Ramsey. “…My prayer has shifted from optimally finding her alive to at least, God willing, finding her body.”

When asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for her final thoughts, Ramsey offered words of comfort for all who are grieving. 

“Composure, faith, believe in God, she’s in God’s grace. We are here temporary, we are there full-time,” she concluded.

The death toll for the Surfside building collapse rose to 12, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Tuesday.

The total number of people unaccounted for is now 149 and the number of people accounted for is 125, Levine Cava said during the latest update on search and rescue efforts.

The mayor also said that the audit of those unaccounted for remains a tedious effort due to duplication of information.

“Over the past few days, we have been conducting an audit of our list of missing persons and we have been working to verify and remove duplicates wherever possible,” she said. “I hope you can understand, we’re getting information from lots of different sources and often not complete so it is very important that we go through to cull the list.”

Detectives have been working around the clock, she said, “to get in touch with all those that have been identified and reaching out to provide information to verify the reports.”

Levine Cava asked for patience as they continue to work through the audit, which she described as “a slow and methodical process.”

Lawyers representing a resident of Champlain Towers South who is suing the building’s condominium association have begun the process of subpoenaing documents from an engineering firm that had been hired to complete repairs on the building after conducting a 2018 survey. 

The lawyers have also formally said they intend to request documents from the condominium association pertaining to the building’s integrity and other matters, according to Brad Sohn, an attorney on the case.

Both requests for discovery — a routine step in a civil lawsuit like this — were detailed in filings before the Florida court where the class action case is being heard. They were not yet available via a public docket. Sohn provided the filing related to the engineering firm to CNN.

The suit, on behalf of Manuel Drezner who lived in unit 1009 of the tower, was filed on Thursday, making it the first civil action after the building’s collapse earlier that day. 

Sohn said his firm has talked to a number of other residents of the tower in recent days who have expressed interest in joining the suit. Morabito Consultants, the engineering firm, is not a defendant in the suit, which was levied against the condominium association.

The subpoena that’s included in the filing is requesting “all documents, electronic records, and communications that refer, relate to, or concern Champlain Towers South and Champlain Towers South Condominium Association, Inc” from the engineering firm.

In the filing, the lawyers also say they intend to subpoena similar documents from the town of Surfside, Florida, where the tower that collapsed is located, as well as other companies in the south Florida area connected to the building, including contractors who studied moisture levels on the building’s roof.

Frank Moribato, the president of Morabito Consultants, found “major structural damage” to an area of concrete beneath the building’s pool deck during a 2018 inspection and was hired by the condominium association in 2019 to complete repairs.

The filing shared with CNN amounts to a notification to the court and the condominium association that Drezner, the plaintiff, is planning to issue the subpoenas. After a 10-day wait period, the subpoenas will likely be issued, giving the recipients 15 days to produce the requested documents.

Champlain Towers South condo is seen following a partial collapse of the building on June 24 in Surfside, Florida.

In dispatch audio obtained by CNN from Broadcastify, a first responder tells dispatch that he has arrived on scene at a 13-story building with most of the building gone.

The first responder goes on to later say, “this building does not look stable.”

“A quarter of the building that’s left – we still have people standing upstairs that still need to be evacuated,” he tells dispatch.

Older buildings like the one in Surfside, Florida, are frequently seeing sea level rise and saltwater intrusion as greater risks, a structural engineer tells CNN.

Ben Schafer, a structural engineer at Johns Hopkins University, says civil engineers need to rethink how buildings are designed and how older buildings need to be reassessed.

Buildings with concrete and steel reinforcements aren’t designed to be submersed in sea water, which it damages concrete and corrodes the steel. As sea level rises, more tidal flooding will bring in more saltwater into coastal infrastructure. 

“The life of the structure would be greatly shortened,” he adds. “It’s a corrosive environment. It’s not favorable for concrete or steel, which are your primary building materials.”

If climate change was in fact a contributing factor to the building collapse, Schafer adds that engineers must learn from the tragic event and implement climate mitigation systems.  

“I don’t think we’ve owned up even to the scale of the problem,” Schafer said. “If you look at the median sea level-rise predictions and project that on to city maps, the scale of what we need to do is so far beyond the scale of what we’re so far considering,” he said.

Sea level in Surfside, Florida, has risen roughly 7 to 8 inches in the past 40 years, due mainly to human-caused climate change, according to Brian McNoldy, a climate and weather researcher at the University of Miami.

The higher sea level increases the frequency of high-tide floods in the Miami area.

As sea level rises, McNoldy said, salt water can degrade infrastructure and infiltrate freshwater wells.

While being careful not to assign blame for the Surfside condo collapse, McNoldy added, “I don’t think I need to be an engineer to conclude this, but any time things are submerged in saltwater, it becomes harsh on them — it doesn’t matter what that material is.”

“We do know that in the past 25 years, sea level has risen almost 6 inches [in the Miami area],” McNoldy told CNN. “If we go back 40 years, we’ve probably seen about 7 to 8 inches of sea level rise and what that does, some low-lying places that maybe didn’t used to flood are starting to now, and places that maybe always did have some issues during exceptionally high tides have even worse issues now.”

McNoldy stressed that the sea level rise has been “across the board around here,” indicating that the influx of rising sea water would be affecting all the structures along the coastline.

A structural engineer from Washington, DC, has been called to investigate the Florida condo collapse by the town of Surfside.

Allyn Kilsheimer, the chairman of the board of KCE Structural Engineers, a Washington, DC, firm, told CNN correspondent Brian Todd on Tuesday that he has about 30 theories for what could’ve triggered the condo to collapse just after midnight on Thursday.

He was asked to visit by an attorney on behalf of Surfside, Florida, on Friday morning, and arrived that afternoon. 

He told CNN that possible triggers could be “an explosion from below, a car hitting a column, problems with the roof slab collapsing down and therefore dropping everything else, problems in the foundation, all that kind of stuff.”

From what Kilsheimer has initially investigated, he said that he hasn’t seen anything from the condo that told him people needed to get out of that building immediately.

So far, Kilsheimer said he’s had access to the perimeter of the site, but “should have access to various portions of the site and the building during the day today.”

Kilsheimer also inspected the garages of nearby buildings. He said, “I didn’t see anything that would make me think the buildings are in danger of collapse.”

For those who are concerned about their own condos, Kilsheimer suggests hiring a registered Florida structural engineer, “not an inspector, not an architect, not a contractor. A structural engineer.”

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava speaks to the media during a press conference in Surfside, Florida, on June 28.

The mayor of Miami-Dade County said Tuesday she would support the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office opening a grand jury investigation into the catastrophic collapse at Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida.

Levine Cava said there is currently a grand jury impaneled which is working on other issues. It has not been decided if they would take up this case, or if it would fall to the next grand jury that is seated. 

The mayor promised she will do everything she can to ensure this does not happen again. “This will never ever happen again, not on my watch. We are going to do everything we possibly can to ensure that,” Levine Cava said.

Earlier today, she said she has been speaking to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle about the matter.  

Col. Golan Vach, commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit, speaks to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on June 29.

The commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit said Tuesday the collapsed bedrooms from the Champlain Towers South building are under 13 to 16 feet of concrete.

“This building collapsed very, very badly, if I can use this word, because it collapsed into itself. And the bedrooms that we are looking for, because the people [slept] in the bedrooms are under four or five meters of concrete,” Col. Golan Vach, commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tuesday.

Vach said his team is comprised of 15 people who are mostly engineers and search and rescue experts. He said his team found new spaces in the rubble to search Monday and Tuesday.

“So there is still hope,” Vach said. “Until one week, I have a solid hope that we will find someone. After one week, it’s minor.” 

He said he had never seen a collapse like the one at Champlain Towers South.

On Thursday morning, Francesco Cordaro and his wife watched on TV as their apartment building in Surfside partially collapsed. At home in Staten Island, New York, they had planned to move to South Florida full-time for retirement.

“The ocean view. The size. The location. I loved everything about that apartment,” said Cordaro, 65, who says he and his wife were in Surfside last month. “All my dreams are shattered.”

Cordaro purchased the apartment in January 2019. That month, he says, he attended a Champlain Towers South condo association meeting where the upcoming 40-year recertification was discussed, along with minor bureaucratic items, but there was no mention of any structural issues in the tower. 

For his part, Cordaro says earlier this month he paid out just over $95,000 for his portion of the building’s “special assessment fee” in connection to the recertification. He says he has not yet hired any legal representation to recoup damages “out of respect” for the tower’s missing residents.

As rescuers continue to look for people in the rubble of a collapsed condo building in Surfside, Florida, the Biden administration is outlining the federal response to the disaster.

Here’s what is included, according to one official:

The President is expected to travel to Surfside with first lady Jill Biden on Thursday.

The condo collapse is on track to become the largest mass casualty event of the Biden presidency so far, with at least 11 people dead and 150 unaccounted for.

After Champlain Towers South partially collapsed in Surfside, Florida, last Thursday, questions continue to be asked about the building’s structural integrity.

While the official cause of the collapse remains unknown, local and federal officials have begun efforts to try to determine why the building partially collapsed, and also prevent similar events from happening in neighboring buildings.

Here’s everything you need to know about the investigation so far:

Read more about the rescue efforts and investigation here.

CNN’s Curt Devine, Hollie Silverman, Alyssa Kraus, Deanna Hackney and Jamiel Lynch contributed reporting to this post. 

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

The mayor of Miami-Dade County said Tuesday said she would support the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office opening a grand jury investigation into the catastrophic collapse at Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said, “the grand jury has not yet been impaneled,” but she has been speaking to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. 

CNN reached out to Fernandez Rundle’s office, who said a statement is forthcoming. 

“We were talking about whenever it is moving forward, that we will be fully on board,” Levine Cava said.

“I am very supportive of the grand jury investigation,” Levine Cava said. “I have pledged my full cooperation, as she moves forward.”

Levine Cava noted that she is very familiar with the grand jury process.

Miami-Dade Police are warning people of traffic closures around the site of the collapse condo building in Surfside.

The department tweeted that Collins Avenue from 81st to 91st street is closed, in addition to Harding Avenue from 81st to 96th street.

Officials said the routes will still be open to residents, hotel staff and guests, and employees and customers of businesses.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the police department said officers are reevaluating the traffic closures on a daily basis.

Read the tweet:

More than 800 responders from 60 agencies are on the ground assisting with the search and rescue efforts in Surfside, Florida, according to Miami-Dade Deputy Incident Commander Charles Cyrille. 

During a news briefing on Tuesday, Cyrille said the unified search and rescue efforts consist of multiple departments to include police, water and sewer and county attorneys. 

This is in addition to the assistance being offered by federal state, local, international and not for profit organizations, Cyrille said. 

More than 440 state workers are also on the ground assisting with the search efforts, officials said. 

Surfside, Florida, Mayor Charles Burkett.

As search and rescue operations entered their sixth day, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said “nobody is giving up hope.”

“We’re dedicated to get everyone out of that pile of rubble, and reunite them with their families,” he added. 

“We have all the resources, what I’ve been saying since the beginning. We don’t have a resource problem. We have a luck problem. As you know, we just got dumped on by some rain, but thankfully it looks like that’s clearing. But the work will go on. We’ll continue to work at 100%,” the mayor continued.

President Biden will look to recommendations from a federal safety panel as he steers the federal government’s probe into what caused the collapse of a condo building near Miami.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would use the board’s findings to determine how infrastructure like residential towers can be better fortified against catastrophic failure.

“They have announced they sent a team of six scientists and engineers to collect firsthand information on the towers, on the Champlain Towers South collapse, that will be used to determine if an investigation or study will be conducted,” Psaki said in response to a question from CNN’s Allie Malloy. “So obviously that would be something the President would support and certainly we would look to that if that’s a decision made to learn how we can help protect infrastructure across the country.”

Psaki said the federal government’s role now – in addition to providing resources – would be helping steer the investigation into what happened.

“We are providing every resource we can from the federal government, not just to help with the search and rescue operations but to be a part of any effort to determine if an investigation should happen moving forward,” she said. “That’s something the President supports and that’s the way we can be constructive from the federal government.”

Miami Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky.

Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said that rescue teams have removed 3 million pounds of concrete so far from the collapse site.

He noted that when they first arrived on the site after the collapse, Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue was able to remove 37 individuals. “We continue searching,” he said.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said officials are taking “swift action” to address any issues with other buildings in the area that have not completed a 40-year recertification process.

Last night, a building officer notified a property in the county that four balconies must be immediately closed due to safety concerns, she said. 

Levine Cava also said that she will be meeting with experts in subject areas like engineering, geology, construction and legal fields.

“They will advise me on issues related to building construction, chain of custody and requirements for reporting, condominium regulation and more, so that my staff and I can develop a set of recommendations for changes that need to be made at all steps in the building process to ensure a tragedy like this will never, ever happen again,” she said.