Firefighters officially end search of Florida apartment collapse

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Firefighters officially ended their search for bodies in the wreckage of a collapsed Surfside apartment building on Friday, even as police and forensic specialists continued to work on identifying human remains.

Miami Fire Department assistant chief Dread Ryde Jadallah told The Associated Press that the fire department’s role in recovering remains at the collapsed Surfside complex is over. They left the site in a convoy of fire trucks and other vehicles and slowly drove to their headquarters.

The avalanche on June 24 killed at least 97 people, and another person believed to be missing in the disaster has yet to be identified.

The site in Surfside is now empty, but it’s still a challenge for local officials. An engineer hired to help figure out the cause of the building’s collapse has warned that the site may still be unsafe.

Structural engineer Allen Kilsheimer told Surfside and Miami-Dade officials in a letter Thursday that Collins Avenue could collapse because the remaining perimeter wall near the road could fail. The development was first reported Friday by the Miami Herald and WPLG.

“We believe there is a potentially dangerous situation at the site, where the wall is in danger of collapsing,” Kilsheimer wrote.

All that remains of the Champlain Building are the walls of an underground parking garage, around a hollow foundation, and without more support for these walls, Kilsheimer says, nearby traffic could cause it to collapse, with parts of the street falling into the void. .

“If the wall were to collapse or rotate significantly, the soil held under the street and sidewalk could move with it,” wrote Kilsheimer, of KCE Structural Engineers.

He recommends building an earthen berm to support the walls near the street and sidewalk. Otherwise, the movement “could cause parts of the street to collapse and could seriously threaten facilities down the street,” he wrote.

Miami-Dade County is bringing in crews to help cement the remaining underground walls, Rachel Johnson, the county’s director of communications, told the Herald.

“We are moving to buy a company to do the shoring and cementing the walls to ensure there are no risks,” she said.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency investigating the crash, was monitoring the site’s safety.

Collins Street, the main thoroughfare on the barrier island, has been closed to traffic near the site since June 24, but city officials said Collins Street will open soon.

In the letter, Kilsheimer said that heavy rainfall would increase the risks exponentially as the land becomes saturated with water.

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