At least one person has died after a condominium building partially collapsed in Surfside, Florida, early on Thursday, with authorities launching a massive search and rescue operation to work through the rubble.
The building, Champlain Tower South, is a 12-story building with 136 apartment units. Fifty-five of those units collapsed, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Ray Jadallah said at a press conference on Thursday morning.
Videos show the side of a building collapsed into large piles of wreckage on the ground.
“We’re going to do everything we can possibly to do identify and rescue those who have been trapped in the rubble,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner Sally Heyman told CNN that 51 people are unaccounted for.
Fire Rescue officials responded to calls about the collapse at approximately 1:30 a.m., Jadallah said. They pulled 35 people trapped in the building, and two from the rubble.
Video from a reporter with News Nation Now shows first responders hauling a person from the rubble before sunrise.
Authorities have said they do not know what caused the building to collapse. Roof work was taking place, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told the Today show, “but you would never expect that to be the issue.”
“I think that this is a catastrophic failure of that building, and we need to try to understand what happened,” Burkett said. “Obviously the foundation somehow was undermined and the whole thing came down. It looks like a bomb went off.”
Burkett also said he does not know how sound the rest of the building’s structure is.
“We don’t know if the rest of the building is going to come down,” he said.
Occupants in the rest of the building were being evacuated this morning, Cava, the Miami-Dade mayor, told NPR.
A neighboring hotel building, the Bluegreen Vacations Solara Surfside resort, was also evacuated because of its proximity to Champlain, Local 10 reported.
Search and rescue dogs deployed to the scene have not been able to find anybody in the rubble so far, Burkett said.
“Apparently when the building came down, it pancaked, so there’s just not a lot of voids that they’re finding or seeing from the outside,” he said.
Jadallah, whose team is leading search and rescue operations, said he does not know how many people are missing. He declined to say if the death toll will increase.
Thunderstorms on Thursday may also hamper authorities. Town Manager Andy Hyatt told reporters that rescue operations will be “long term, and possibly at least a week.”
The offices of Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis, have been in touch with local leaders, Hyatt said.
Champlain Towers South, a beachfront condominium building, was built in the 1980s, the Miami Herald reported.
Listings show that a two-bedroom unit in the building currently costs at least $600,000.
