Atop the grim pile of detritus and broken concrete on Monday, some of the world’s most elite rescue crews tunnelled and dug, sometimes with their hands, in hopes of finding hints of the living. As the afternoon dragged on, it appeared their hopes would be dashed for another day.
But on occasion, the workers would pause, and bend down, and collect what amounted to small, fragile consolation prizes: the personal photos from the residents of the Champlain Towers South, a building that less than a week ago had been alive with a typically South Florida assemblage of families, grandparents and retirees.
Monday was the fifth day of the extensive search-and-rescue effort, and the possibility of finding alive any of the 150 people believed to be missing dwindled further. The pictures, and a few other personal effects that somehow managed to survive the collapse, were at least something.
“There’s not a lot,” said Maggie Castro, a firefighter and paramedic for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and a rescue specialist for Florida Task Force 1, one of the elite urban search-and-rescue teams that have been working on the rubble pile since Friday.
Castro said most everything inside the building was destroyed when a significant portion shuddered and collapsed on itself early Thursday morning. “There have been some wallets. Some pieces of jewelry. Larger picture frames we have identified to go back to them,” she said.
The careful effort to preserve at least some of the belongings of the people who had lived in the tower is one of many ways that rescue officials are acknowledging that the daunting, and sometimes harrowing, technical challenges they face are only part of their job. Starting on Sunday, officials began escorting families of the missing to the site to see, close up, an emergency response involving hundreds of rescue personnel.
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Some families have been frustrated, and even angry, with the slow pace of the rescue work. But Castro said she hoped the families’ ability to see the magnitude of the disaster might help them understand why it is so slow-going — and perhaps help them process a reality that can still feel like a nightmare. The work on the site has gone slowly, with no good news since a few rescues Thursday. At Monday news conferences, officials announced that the death tally had risen, by two, to 11.
“It’s one thing to sit somewhere and imagine what is happening, and it’s another thing to see it for yourself,” she said. “For some of them, this might be as close as they get to their families ever again.”
