Israeli rescue team vows to help find every person still alive in the Surfside condo collapse | Editorial
On Day 5, the reality is slowly sinking in that rescuers may not find survivors in the rubble of the Champlain South Tower in Surfside.
After being allowed to see the destruction up close on Sunday, a new mood has fallen over some relatives waiting at nearby hotels for news.
“Families are coming to their own conclusions,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters.
“We have shown them the pancake area, where the tunnel is being dug. They have seen the operation now ... They are preparing themselves.”
There is still hope, Levine Cava said. This is still a massive search-and-rescue mission, she insisted. Hope for a miracle continues for the 150 unaccounted for, as it should.
Levine Cava, on the job as Miami-Dade mayor for mere months, has handled this terrible situation with sensitivity and grace. She has been a comforting leader during her daily media briefings. She has been at the scene, deftly handling the job of dispensing a mix of hope and bad news.
That included the news Monday that the death toll had risen by day’s end to 11 — but also that reinforcements, including state and foreign search-and-rescue teams, from Israel and Mexico, have joined in to dig.
The team from Israel began their first full day of work Monday at the request of family members. At a private family briefing posted by a relative on Instagram, the 10-member team’s commander told relatives his team found survivors a week after the deadly Haiti earthquake in 2010. “Anything is possible,” commander Golan Vacham said.
The Israeli team showed the relatives a graphic they created dissecting the partial collapse: the building over the garage went first, followed by a section behind it, then an adjacent tower fell a few seconds later.
Over the weekend, paperwork has been released detailing how the building’s garage section had been identified as weak as far back as 2018, but a Surfside building inspector dismissed any urgency with the building’s condo board association.
For relatives who have resigned themselves that their loved ones have perished, the Israeli commander said his team has the “methodology” to isolate every crumbled apartment unit at the Champlain and search inside it.
“We can search for every one of your loved ones missing. We can find each person in each apartment,” he said.
