The death toll from the building that collapsed in Miami closes at 98

Photograph of the area where the Champlain Towers apartment complex used to be, today a solar.Giorgio Viera / EFE

Almost a month after the body of the first tenant was rescued from under the rubble left by the collapse of a building in the town of Surfside, in Miami County, this Monday the mortal remains of Estelle Hedaya, from 54 years, the last mortal victim of this tragedy, which closes the death toll at a total of 98. According to the authorities, everyone who had been reported missing has been identified.

“It's hard to believe that a month has passed since what may be the greatest tragedy in the history of our community,” Daniella Levine-Cava, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, where Surfside is located, declared on Twitter last Saturday. . "Although the site of the collapse was small, in a very close-knit city, the impact has been felt far beyond our county, it has affected many lives around the world," Levine-Cava said in a video posted on the social network.

The search and rescue teams put an end to their work on Friday the 23rd, a day before the month of the misfortune that changed the lives of entire families. The images of the tragedy, recorded in 11 seconds of video from a security camera in a neighboring building, caused the pain to reach remote and remote places such as Venezuela and Israel, countries in which many of the residents were born. In all likelihood this is the worst collapse ever to occur in Florida.

The 12-story building collapsed in the early morning hours of June 24, causing firefighters and other emergency experts to find almost all the bodies in their beds.

Except for a teenager, who survived, and his mother, who was still breathing when pulled from the ruins, but who died upon arrival at the hospital, no one else has been rescued alive.

At the end of the day that the United States celebrates its Independence, on July 4 the part of the building that was still standing and that made rescue work difficult was demolished in a controlled manner.

For a few more days, the relatives of the disappeared were fed by the hope of finding a loved one alive.

Up to 10 bodies were extracted after the new collapse caused.

Every day, the authorities confirmed that the rescue was continuing.

On July 7, two weeks after the original collapse, the emergency team gave up on finding anyone alive and announced the start of the body recovery phase.

That day they picked up the sniffer dogs and removed the devices and cameras that locate sound and reveal life by the temperature of the bodies.

There were 200 rescuers at the scene, which was also hit by the wind and rain left by tropical storm Elsa.

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Where once the building known as Champlain Towers stood, there is now an almost completely flattened lot, after rammers leveled the ground, and workers removed up to 10,000 tons of debris.

All those rubble, the mass of remains that was once a building, have been transferred to a warehouse in Miami, where specialists continue the work of recovering human remains.

Meanwhile, the investigation into what happened is continuing and the report of the federal agency in charge of the investigation (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NITS in its acronym in English) may take years to arrive.

The great question, painful and unanswered, is what to do with the place occupied by the property built in 1981. Both owners and authorities are debating between building anew or creating a monument on the site in honor of the deceased.

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