People visit a makeshift memorial to the victims of the building collapse near the accident site in Surfside, Florida on Sunday. Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images Hide caption
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Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images
People visit a makeshift memorial to the victims of the building collapse near the site of the accident in Surfside, Florida on Sunday.
Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images
As rescuers continue to comb through the rubble in Surfside, Florida, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Sunday evening that rescuers identified four more victims in the partial collapse of the Chaplain Towers South building.
Miami-Dade police posted the names of the other victims on Twitter: Leon Oliwkowiicz, 80; Luis Bermudez, 26; Anna Ortiz, 46; Christina Beatriz Elvira, 74.
So far, authorities have publicly identified eight of the nine victims, aged 26 to 83, including the four aforementioned victims.
The official death toll is unchanged from earlier Sunday at nine. The number of missing persons is 152, of which 134 have now been recorded.
Mayor Levine Cava said the victims’ families had an opportunity to visit the site privately on Sunday.
But she said there were families of missing people who the detectives were unable to contact. She asked family members who did not file a missing person report to speak to a detective and have their DNA swabbed so that it can be matched against any remains found. “This will be vital to our identification,” she said.
During the same press conference, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett was asked questions about the minutes of a November 2018 meeting, first reported by NPR, where a Surfside City inspector met with residents of the building and assured them that the Building is “in very good condition”. “
This was a month after an advisory group identified serious problems and warned in an October 2018 report that the building had “major structural damage”.
“That’s not what I was there for,” said Burkett, noting that he was not yet mayor at the time. He said he had asked Surfside officials “to find all correspondence relating to this building and post it on our website.”
Mayor Burkett also said the owner of Champlain Towers North, which is largely identical to the collapsed building and built at the same time by the same developer, will call in an engineering firm Tuesday to conduct a “top-down” study, using x-rays and ground penetrating radar. An earlier “superficial review” did not immediately find anything wrong, he said earlier.
Some residents have voluntarily evacuated this building, but there is no mandatory evacuation.
