Local firefighters to return home after assisting search efforts at collapsed Florida condo
Jul. 17—A group of five firefighters from Scranton, including the city's fire chief, returned to Pennsylvania on Friday after two weeks in South Florida as part of a team helping sift through the rubble of a destroyed condominium building.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency on June 30 gave activation orders to Pennsylvania Task Force 1 — an amalgam of crews from Pennsylvania and Maryland agencies that make up a federal search and rescue team — to respond to Surfside, Florida, where nearly 100 people died in last month's collapse of Champlain Towers South, said Fire Chief John Judge, a member of the task force.
Judge was joined by city fire Lt. Brian Scott, Capt. Robert Zoltewicz, Chauffeur Matthew McDonald and retired Capt. David Schreiber to work through the condo's wreckage and find the remains of the victims. A task force member since 2011 who has been deployed to several areas hit hard by hurricanes, Judge said the job in Florida was one of the most difficult.
"I don't even know how to describe it," Judge said as he passed through the Washington, D.C. area Friday morning. "It was something you can only envision out of a movie ... to see a pile of rubble and knowing there were people in there."
Schreiber said they were joined by firefighters from departments that included Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Baltimore County. Schreiber said it was "strenuous work, hard work," but it could help bring some measure of closure to the families of the victims.
The Associated Press reported Friday that efforts to recover human remains from the condo building were nearing an end, with officials having identified 94 of the 97 confirmed dead and accounted for at least 240 people connected to the building.
"At this step in the recovery process, it has become increasingly difficult to identify victims, and we are relying heavily on the work of the medical examiner's office and the scientific, technical process of identifying human remains," a statement issued Thursday by Miami-Dade County said. "This work becomes more difficult with the passage of time, although our teams are working as hard and as fast as they can."
No cause has been identified for the collapse, but there were previous warnings of major structural damage at the building, according to the AP.
Judge said the team was to be debriefed Friday afternoon in Philadelphia, then they'd return to Scranton.
The Philadelphia Fire Department, which said in a statement it sponsors the task force, said the team is comprised of technical search specialists, structural engineers, doctors, canines and canine handlers and other experts.
Their duties in Florida included recovering human remains and property, delayering debris, assisting crane operations, mapping and collecting data.
Contact the writer: jkohut@timesshamrock.com, 570-348-9100, x5187; @jkohutTT on Twitter.
