NEW: Emergency workers who have spent 14 days pulling apart the rubble of a collapsed condo building near Miami said Wednesday they were switching from rescue to recovery mode, signaling the effort to find survivors was all but over.
SURFSIDE, Fla. — Emergency workers gave up Wednesday on any hope of finding survivors in a collapsed Florida condo building, telling sobbing families that there was “no chance of life” in the rubble as crews shifted their efforts to recovering more remains.
“Our sole responsibility at this point is to bring closure,” he said, as relatives cried in the background. Hope of finding survivors was briefly rekindled after workers demolished the remainder of the building, allowing rescuers access to new areas of debris. Twice during the search operation, rescuers had to suspend the mission because of the instability of the remaining part of the condominium building and the preparation for demolition.
Naum Lusky, president of the Champlain Towers North condo association, said engineers hired by the city arrived Tuesday to conduct three days of tests at the building, which has a similar design and was built at about the same time as Champlain Towers South.