Miami building collapse death toll rises to nine

Miami building collapse death toll rises to nine

Scores of rescue workers remained on the massive pile of rubble, working to find survivors among the more than 150 people who remain unaccounted for

AgenciesUpdated: Monday, June 28, 2021, 01:32 AM IST
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Crews work near a open tunnel, center near the bottom, in the rubble at the Champlain Towers South Condo, on June 27, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. | AFP

Washington: The death toll from the collapse of a Florida beachfront condo building has risen to nine as search-and-rescue efforts continue, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Sunday.

One person died in the hospital, and workers pulled four more bodies from the wreckage, the mayor said.

Scores of rescue workers remained on the massive pile of rubble, working to find survivors among the more than 150 people who remain unaccounted for. Four of the dead have been identified and next of kin notified, the mayor said.

Four days after Thursday's collapse, more than 150 people remain unaccounted for in Surfside, and authorities and loved ones fear the toll will go much higher.

As rotating teams of rescuers used heavy machinery and power tools to clear the rubble from the top and tunnel in from below, the Noriega family hoped that their 92-year-old matriarch, Hilda Noriega, had somehow survived.

When Mike Noriega heard that part of the condominium tower where his grandmother lived had collapsed, he rushed with his father to the scene. They arrived at a nightmarish 30-foot pile of broken concrete and mangled metal, the remains of the 12-story building known as Champlain Towers South.

But among the flying debris, they stumbled across mementos that bore witness to Hilda's life on the sixth floor: an old picture of her with her late husband and their infant son, and a birthday card that friends from her prayer group sent two weeks earlier with the acronym "ESM," Spanish for "hand-delivered," scrawled across the yellow envelope with a butterfly etching.

"There was a message in the mess of all this," said Mike Noriega, who last spoke with his grandmother the day before the disaster. "It means not to give up hope. To have faith." Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett sought to assure families Sunday that rescuers were working nonstop. "Nothing else on our mind, with the only objective of pulling their family members out of that rubble," he told ABC's "This Week." "We're not going to stop doing that -- not today, not tomorrow, not the next day. We're going to keep going until everybody's out." The Noriega family described Hilda as a fiercely independent and vivacious retiree - in Mike's words, "the youngest 92-year-old I know ... 92 going on 62." Hilda Noriega had called Champlain Towers South home for more than 20 years. But six years after her husband's death, she was ready to leave. The condo was for sale, and she planned to move in with family.

She loved living near the ocean and friends, but "when you lose a spouse, you want to be surrounded by family ... and she wanted to spend more time with her family and grandchildren," said Sally Noriega, Hilda's daughter-in-law.

Hilda Noriega was a loving person who built a life with her husband and raised a family after coming to the U.S. from Cuba in 1960, her daughter-in-law said.

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