Death toll expected to climb from condo tower collapse in Fla.

SURFSIDE, Fla. – The death toll from the late-night collapse of a 12-story building near Miami Beach appears likely to climb, with authorities saying all survivors have already been rescued.

One person has been confirmed dead so far. Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was “bracing for bad news.”

A total of 51 residents have not been accounted for, in the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South Condo, Miami-Dade Commissioner Sally Heyman told CNN. The commissioner said it is not clear if all 51 people were in the building when it fell because of “vacations or anything else, so we’re still waiting and unfortunately the hope is still there, but it is waning.”

“I could hear somebody yelling, screaming,” Nicholas Balboa told CNN. “I could hear by his voice it was a little boy. I saw an arm sticking out of the wreckage.” He and the other person tried to climb up, but it was “too heavy” with too much rebar.

He said the boy was screaming, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

Balboa called over police, who climbed up using flashlight from Balboa’s cellphone, and confirmed the boy was buried, and got firefighters over to pull him out.

Frank Rollason, director of Miami-Dade Emergency Management, told The Miami Herald that emergency workers believe they have cleared all survivors from inside the tower, which has more than 130 apartments. He said more than 70 of them have been destroyed or damaged.

“Everyone who is alive is out of the building,” he said.

Outside a family reunification site set up at the Surfside Community Center, Hildelisa Gonzalez clutched a photo of her missing 45-year-old cousin, Edgar Gonzalez, who lived on the ninth floor.

Her cousin’s wife, Angela, and daughter, Devin, were rescued from the rubble and taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where they’re expected to recover, she said.

“We’re just trying to find my cousin,” said Gonzalez, fighting back tears. “We know they recovered his daughter and his wife. But we have no word on him.”

“Their floor got hit hard. There’s nothing you can do. Just the thought of having to hold his picture is weird. You can’t be mad at anybody because they are trying to recover people. I don’t know what to do.”

The tower at 8777 Collins Ave. collapsed around 1:30 a.m. A surveillance video showed the building falling to the ground in seconds, with the center going down first and the side sagging on top of it, sending up huge clouds of dust.

Rescue workers with ladder trucks and search dogs have been going through the rubble for survivors.

They had to amputate one woman’s leg to get her out, Rollason told the Miami Herald.

“The first responders were able to save a lot of people,” DeSantis said. “They are going to be going through more. It’s a really, really tragic situation. We’ll hope for the best in terms of additional recoveries, but we are bracing for some bad news just given the destruction that we’re seeing.”

President Joe Biden called Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. “He offered the full support of the federal gov. to help our community during this difficult time,” she said in a tweet.

A hotline to report missing family members has been set up at 305-614-1819.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the building manager told him the building was substantially full.

“The building is literally pancaked,” Burkett said at a news conference. “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.”

The building and the neighborhood have large Jewish populations, with five synagogues within walking distance.

Chani Lipskar, wife of the rabbi at the Shul of Bal Harbour, said thousands of people “across the globe” were reciting prayers for the 22 Jewish people missing, as well as everyone else unaccounted for.

Her synagogue brought chocolate milk and sandwiches to the Surfside Community Center where families were waiting for news of their loved ones.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said 55 units were in the collapsed portion of the building. They pulled 35 people from building, 10 were treated at the scene and two were hospitalized.

“We were sound asleep and we heard a weird noise that woke us up in the middle of the night,” said Ofi Osin-Cohen, who lives in the third floor. “It could have been thunder but it didn’t quite seem like thunder. And I said what is going on? Is it raining? We looked outside and I saw a plume of smoke coming up.”

“And I said to my husband, ‘Grab a few things, your wallet, your phone, your charger, we gotta get out of here.’”

They opened the door of their apartment and saw the hallway blocked by debris. They went down a different hallway and found an exit door that wouldn’t open. The garage level was filled with water.

“There were two elderly people there that we took with us and said, ‘Let’s go back to our apartment. We can go on the balcony. They’ll rescue us from the balcony.’ We live on the third floor. We lived on the third floor. So we did that. We let fire rescue know the building was not passable, we needed to get out and we needed them to rescue us.”

———

(Staff writers Susannah Bryan, Lisa J. Huriash and Anthony Man and photographer Susan Stocker contributed to this report.)