On Tuesday, the number of confirmed dead from the collapse of a Florida condo building last month surpassed 95, after one more body was discovered in the rubble overnight.
Officials say 14 people are still missing in the ruins of Surfside’s Champlain Tower South, which collapsed on June 24.
Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade said 85 of the victims had been identified.
“Our teams have continued the search and recovery as we work as hard as ever on the collapse to recover remains and to bring closure to the families who are still waiting,” Levine Cava said at a briefing Tuesday.
“We’ve now moved over 18 million pounds of concrete and debris and 892 trucks have come through the site to transport the debris,” she said.
Heavy rains, according to Levine Cava, have posed a challenge for first responders, with municipal workers being called in to pump water from the ruins.
As detectives continue to fact-check the list of victims and remove duplicate names, she said the number of people missing continues to fluctuate.
Hundreds of first responders have been sifting through the rubble for the past 20 days, working around the clock with only brief breaks due to inclement weather.
Officials claim that no survivors have been found since the collapse.
Initially, the mission was classified as a search-and-rescue operation to locate survivors. Officials reclassified it as a recovery effort after more than two weeks, a search for the bodies of those buried in the deadly collapse.
Officials have begun to discuss the site’s future, with Levine Cava claiming that there is a push to preserve at least part of it as a memorial for the dozens who died there.
Some of the survivors of the collapse, according to Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett, have expressed interest in rebuilding the tower on at least part of the site.
“Some of the families also want to go back and live there again,” Burkett said. “They want the building rebuilt on a portion of the site. They acknowledge that a percentage of that site is a holy site, as I’ve said before. But they haven’t given up on their home.
“And I think that this is something that we will also be looking at because obviously, our job here is to make the families whole,” he said. “Our job is to put them back in a place where they can restart their lives.”
