FLORIDA CONDO COLLAPSE DEATH TOLL RISES TO 16

The known death toll in last week’s collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla., rose by four, to 16, on Wednesday, as the authorities said more bodies were recovered from the rubble overnight, the New York Times reported.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade County said as many as 147 people remained missing, nearly a week after the desperate search for survivors began.

“It’s an extremely, extremely difficult situation,” said Chief Alan Cominsky of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. “We keep moving forward. We keep looking for certain signs.” Even as days passed with little hopeful news, officials said they remained to focus on comforting families and continuing to search for any survivors in the rubble, Mitch Smith and Frances Robles reported for the New York Times.

Reporting for Reuters, Gabriella Borter stressed that officials have said they still harbor hope of finding survivors.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said in an interview he had promised families that rescue crews were "not leaving anyone behind."

He added: "We've not gotten to the bottom. We don't know what's down there. We're not going to guess. We're not going to make a life-or-death decision to arbitrarily stop searching for people who may be alive in that rubble."

Burkett said every day the rubble pile is visibly shrinking, indicating progress. Two teams of dogs are helping to scour the pile: one trained to sniff out survivors, the other trained to detect bodies.

Investigators have not concluded what caused nearly half of the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South condo to crumple as residents slept in the early hours of last Thursday.

But a 2018 engineer's report on the 12-floor, 136-unit complex, prepared ahead of a building safety recertification process, found structural deficiencies that are now the focus of inquiries.

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