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June 27 (Reuters) – The Israelis came trained for war. Mexicans, due to a natural disaster.
Search and rescue teams from Mexico and Israel joined a battalion of local firefighters and other specially trained experts to comb the rubble for survivors as a high-rise apartment building collapsed near Miami on Thursday, killing at least nine people and about 150 are still missing. . Sunday. Read more
When it comes to collapsed buildings, there is a cadre of international rescue workers ready to cross the border at any moment. Many members of the Miami-Dade County team have experience abroad themselves, particularly during the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
The collaboration reflects the international nature of the Miami region, which includes the Jewish diaspora and Latin America. Formal briefings are given in Spanish and Haitian Creole in addition to English. Among the missing are relatives of Paraguay’s first lady.
The exact roles of the Mexican and Israeli teams have not been detailed. Local officials say they have plenty of help on hand and are rotating rescue teams to keep people up to date. If nothing else, the international presence is symbolic and may offer some solace, especially to the local Jewish community.
“We’ve called a small team from Israel to come in. A lot of families with unaccounted for loved ones wanted it,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a news conference on Sunday.
An Israeli official said more than two dozen of the missing were Jews with links to Israel.
“It really hurts,” Israel’s consul general in Miami, Maor Elbaz Starinsky, told WPLG TV. “Personally, I can identify (with families) from the Israeli experience.”
moles
Tobos in Mexico, the Spanish word for moles, are treated like heroes at home, and gain notoriety when they hide in heaps of rubble in disasters around the world, including the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
Miami-Dade officials said they were on the ground in Florida on Friday, the day after the disaster.
Formed as a volunteer search and rescue group in the aftermath of the massive earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985, Tubos saved lives in the working-class neighborhood of Tlatelolco where there was little government response.
They became known as brave workers, putting their lives at risk to help others and to travel to disasters as far away as Haiti, Nepal and the Philippines.
After the 2017 earthquake shook parts of Mexico City, they did their job in front of hundreds of people who had gathered around the destroyed buildings.
Easily spotted by their bright suits and helmets, they will be greeted with applause and cheers upon their arrival at the scene. But the crowds were also silent when asked, in moments when rescuers need calm to listen for any buried survivors.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the Israeli rescuers belonged to the Israel Defense Forces, and among them were about 10 reserve officers from the Home Front Command, along with personnel from the Foreign Ministry.
Nachman Shai, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, tweeted a picture of him meeting with US officials and the rabbi of a local synagogue near the scene of the disaster.
Charles Burkett, the mayor of the Surfside suburb of Miami where the disaster occurred, described a meeting between the Israelis and the families of the missing.
“They wanted to know if the Israeli team thought the Miami Dead was doing the right thing,” Burkett told reporters on Sunday. “The Israeli captain did not hesitate, turned around and said, ‘They were doing exactly the right thing.'”
(covering by Daniel Trotta) in Carlsbad, California (Additional reporting by Doina Chiaco in Washington Editing) by Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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