1 dead, many trapped after part of Miami condo crashes
Print Edition
A WING of a 12-story beachfront condo building collapsed in a town outside Miami early yesterday, killing at least one person while trapping residents in rubble and twisted metal. Scores of rescuers pulled survivors from the debris as a cloud of dust floated through the neighborhood.
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett warned that the building manager told him the tower was quite full and the death toll was likely to rise.
“The building is literally pancaked,” he said. “That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me that we are going to be as successful as we wanted to be in finding people alive.”
Rescuers have pulled 35 people from the building and were continuing to look for more, said Raide Jadallah, assistant fire chief of operations for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue.
Earlier, Burkett said two people were brought to the hospital, one of whom died. He added that 15 families walked out of the building on their own.
Work is currently being done on the building’s roof, but Burkett said he did not see how that could have caused the collapse. Authorities did not say what the cause may be.
The collapse left a number of homes in the still-standing part of the building exposed. Television footage showed bunk beds, tables and chairs still left inside. Air conditioner units were hanging from some parts of the building, where wires now dangled.
Barry Cohen, 63, said he and his wife were asleep in the building when he first heard what he thought was a crack of lightning. The couple went onto their balcony, then opened the door to the building’s hallway to find “a pile of rubble and dust and smoke billowing around.”
“I couldn’t walk out past my doorway,” said Cohen, the former vice mayor of Surfside. “A gaping hole of rubble.”
He and his wife eventually made it to the basement and found rising water there. They returned upstairs, screamed for help and were eventually brought to safety by firefighters using a cherry-picker.
Cohen said he raised concerns years ago about whether nearby construction might be causing damage to the building after seeing cracked pavers on the pool deck.
The seaside condo, built in 1981, had more than 130 units. Officials have said about 80 were occupied.
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