Three Long Island natives are among 145 other people still lacking after a beachfront condo collapsed in Surfside, Florida, more than a week ago, according to news reports.
Brothers Brad and Gary Cohen were still a week away, according to NBC New York, whose reporters spoke with a Dix Hills rabbi who has known the Cohens for more than 20 years. Brad lives in Surfside and Gary visits from his home in Alabama when the building collapsed on June 24 at approximately 1:30 a. m.
“I’m sick. With a broken heart, I am a desperate case,” Rabbi Yakov Saacks told NBC.
“When there is life there is hope. And we don’t know for sure that there is no life,” he added.
Judy Spiegel, a Plainview resident, is also among the missing, according to CBS New York. Her daughter, Rachel, and son, Josh, spoke with CBS reporter Jessica Layton the day after the collapse. Both parents lived on day 6. floor of the apartment and their father is safe; He was traveling to California at the time. Rachel had spoken to her mother a few hours before the collapse.
“She texted me and said, ‘I remembered scarlett looking for this Disney costume,’ my daughter. “I just remembered it. I connected to the internet and got it in a length of four and bought it. ‘So my daughter has a dress that comes in my mother’s mail, and I need my mother to give it to her,’ Rachel told Layton on a Facetime call.
“She’s the most productive, our most productive friend. I can’t live without it,” Josh added.
So far, another 18 people have been shown dead in the cave of the Champlain Towers South condominium construction in Surfside, a small town on the water north of Miami Beach.
Rescuers are still searching for other people in the rubble. The search was halted for 14 hours on Thursday, July 1, due to concerns that the remaining component of the construction would fall off. they are still missing and worry about being buried under tons of shotcrete, twisted steel and broken wood as the search reaches its ninth day on Friday.
Two of the dead were four- and ten-year-olds.
As a component of the new search plan, he would restrict his paintings for now to just 3 of the nine grids delineated in the ruins of the 12-story condo at Champlain Towers South, Miami-Dade County rescue and chimney leader Alan Cominsky said.
Officials were eager to make all the progress imaginable ahead of Elsa’s expected arrival, which strengthened Friday with the first hurricane of the 2021 season threatening the Caribbean.
The typhoon could hit south Florida tuesday morning, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, with heavy rain and strong winds before that, but the outlet warned that Elsa’s planned trajectory remains uncertain.
The renewed search effort began shortly after a stopover on the scene Thursday through U. S. President Joe Biden, who spent about 3 hours comforting the families of the dead and missing in the beachfront town of Surfside, adjacent to Miami Beach.
The president also met with first responders and briefed state and local leaders, adding that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was widely regarded as a possible Republican nominee for the White House in 2024.
Biden, a Democrat, told them he would provide “everything they need” federal assistance, adding transitional housing for survivors.
Biden, whose non-public delight with the tragedy helped delineate his lack of political publicity, stated that clients locating more survivors vanished with each passing day, but said it was imaginable that someone was still alive.
“Hope is eternal,” he said at a news conference in neighbors of St. Regis after meeting privately with affected families and before seeing flowers and posters interwoven into a fence like a makeshift memorial near the ruins.
“The whole country is grieving with those families. They see it every day on TV, they live in hell,” he told reporters. “I sat down with a woman who lost her husband and young son and didn’t know what to do. “do. “
No one has been rescued from the collapsed building in the following hours after a portion of the 136-unit building collapsed on itself in the middle of the night, while citizens slept.
Investigators have not decided what caused the collapse of the 40-year-old condo complex in one of the deadliest building collapses in U. S. history.
But a 2018 engineering report prepared through an engineering firm ahead of a construction protection re-certification procedure revealed structural deficiencies in the condo complex that are now under investigation, adding a grand jury review.
USA Today, bringing up a document the newspaper received from a circle of family members of a missing victim, reported Thursday night that a 2020 document from the same corporation noted “curious results” after testing the intensity of the concrete sloof beneath the pool. the document did not specify what that meant, the newspaper reported.
The company also documented a serious deterioration in the group’s domain and expressed fears that maintenance could threaten the stability of neighboring domains, according to USA Today.
As recently as last April, the president of the condominium corporation warned citizens in a letter that the primary concrete known to the engineer around the base of the construction had “significantly worsened. “
-With Reuters (report via Katanga Johnson and Francisco Alvarado in Surfside, Florida; additional reports via Jarrett Renshaw, Dan Whitcomb, Brendan O’Brien, Peter Szekely, Kanishka Singh and Trevor Hunnicutt; written through Steve Gorman; edited via Simon Cameron-Moore, Steve Orlofsky and Jonathan Oatis)
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