Rescue teams early Friday combed through the rubble of an oceanfront apartment block near Miami Beach that partially collapsed, killing at least one person and leaving another 99 unaccounted for amid fears of a much higher death toll.
An unknown number of residents are feared to have been asleep in the 12-story building, in the town of Surfside, when the collapse in the wee hours of Thursday morning reduced a large portion of it to a pile of debris, exposing the interiors of gutted apartments.
“One side of the building just fell completely. It doesn’t exist anymore,” said Nicolas Fernandez, 29, an Argentinian resident of Miami who had yet to hear from friends who were staying overnight in his family’s unit in the building.
“I don’t know about them. I don’t know if they are alive,” he told AFP.
Authorities said they were still without news of 99 people who may have been inside the building when part of it came crashing down.
So far 102 others have been accounted for, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.
Search and rescue teams with sniffer dogs were set to work through Thursday night, Levine Cava said. “As the day comes to an end, their day does not,” she said at an evening news conference, the last until Friday morning.
During Friday’s early hours, President Joe Biden declared an emergency, ordering federal assistance for the local relief effort.
“The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts,” the White House said in a statement.
At a Surfside community center, relatives of the missing cried as they waited for news. Tenants of the ruined building who were lucky enough to have been away when disaster struck pondered sudden homelessness.
Erick de Moura, 40, happened to spend Wednesday night at his girlfriend’s house.
“I just came back and the scene is shocking,” he said. “There is a lot of pain. I’m blessed that I am alive.”
Around 55 apartments were affected by the collapse, according to Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Ray Jadallah, who told a news conference that emergency services arrived at the scene at around 1:30 am, evacuating 35 people from the building.
The building was occupied by a mix of full-time and seasonal residents and renters, and officials have stressed it is unclear how many people were actually inside at the time.
“It’s hard to get a count on it,” Miami-Dade County Commissioner Sally Heyman told CNN.
“You don’t know between vacations or anything else,” she said. “The hope is still there, but it’s waning.”
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the reasons for the collapse were still unclear.
“It looks like a bomb went off, but we’re pretty sure a bomb didn’t go off, so it’s something else,” Burkett said.
Fernandez, the Argentinian resident of Miami, said that when his mother called him in the early hours to say the building had collapsed, he thought it was a joke – and hung up.
“She calls me again and tells me: ‘Nico, you know I would never joke about this. I need you to go over there.’ We came running.”
One witness, 25-year-old Julian Targowski, described the sound of the collapse.
“It was like a very bass-y, like boom boom, boom boom, that kind of thing,” he told local television WFOR.
“Like, a ton of bass on a subwoofer, basically, like just two of them,” he said. “Then my friend texted me that a building had exploded.”
Local media said records showed the block was built in 1981 and had more than 130 units inside.
Heyman told CNN the building had been undergoing construction work on its roof, although she also stressed the reasons for the collapse were not clear.
