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Working through the outer bands of a tropical storm, rescue workers recovered the bodies of 10 more victims from the rubble of a crumpled condominium in Surfside, Fla., late Tuesday and early Wednesday, the most they have found in a 12-hour period since the building collapsed nearly two weeks ago.
The grim discoveries raised the confirmed death toll to 46, with 94 people remaining unaccounted for, although not all of those were definitely in the tower when it fell.
“As the magnitude of this catastrophe continues to grow each and every day since the collapse, the community and the world are grieving,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade County said at a news conference on Wednesday morning.
Ms. Levine Cava began to cry as she repeated her tally of the dead in Spanish. “Our commitment to this mission is deeply personal,” she said. “These are our neighbors and community.”
Throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday, search-and-rescue teams continued to look for pockets in the debris where survivors might be found, but the prospect of finding anyone alive seemed increasingly unlikely.
Chief Alan Cominsky of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue told reporters that rescuers had seen no indication that any of the recovered victims had survived the building’s initial collapse. He declined to say if search crews believed anyone might remain alive in the rubble.
“We’ve been exhausting every effort,” he said of the search effort, “and that’s where we are right now.”
Rescue workers had to pause at points on Tuesday because of lightning strikes, and had anticipated that they might have to do so again on Wednesday as Tropical Storm Elsa reached hurricane strength around 100 miles west of Florida. But forecasters downgraded Elsa to a tropical storm before it made landfall late Wednesday morning on Florida’s sparsely populated northern Gulf Coast coast, in Taylor County southeast of Tallahassee.
After periods of heavy rainfall and lightning on Tuesday, the sky in the Miami area was merely overcast on Wednesday morning, with a slight breeze.
Mayor Charles W. Burkett of Surfside said that the collapse site on Wednesday was the busiest he had seen it. Rescue teams were using heavy equipment, including ground-penetrating radar, to look for remains, he said.
On Tuesday evening, officials offered reporters a limited glimpse of the building site for the first time. What had once been part of the roof of the residential tower at 8777 Collins Avenue was almost at street level, a dark splintered slab identifiable by a ventilation or exhaust fixture still in one piece, slanted atop the pile like a top hat.
Debris poked out at every possible angle. Twisted metal knotted together like tree branches. Even the planters on the sidewalk were cracked, a few surviving palm trees withering away. Heavy machinery trawled at the back of the site, digging through the rubble in a search-and-rescue effort that has, day after heartbreaking day, yielded no signs of life.
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