The death toll for the Surfside building collapse rose to 12, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Tuesday.
The total number of people unaccounted for is now 149 and the number of people accounted for is 125, Levine Cava said during the latest update on search and rescue efforts.
The mayor also said that the audit of those unaccounted for remains a tedious effort due to duplication of information.
“Over the past few days, we have been conducting an audit of our list of missing persons and we have been working to verify and remove duplicates wherever possible,” she said. “I hope you can understand, we’re getting information from lots of different sources and often not complete so it is very important that we go through to cull the list.”
Detectives have been working around the clock, she said, “to get in touch with all those that have been identified and reaching out to provide information to verify the reports.”
Levine Cava asked for patience as they continue to work through the audit, which she described as “a slow and methodical process.”
Also in progress:
—-Lawyers representing a resident of Champlain Towers South who is suing the building’s condominium association have begun the process of subpoenaing documents from an engineering firm that had been hired to complete repairs on the building after conducting a 2018 survey.
—-In dispatch audio obtained by CNN from Broadcastify, a first responder tells dispatch that he has arrived on scene at a 13-story building with most of the building gone the first responder goes on to later say, “this building does not look stable. “A quarter of the building that’s left – we still have people standing upstairs that still need to be evacuated,” he tells dispatch. “I see many people on their balconies. The building is gone. There’s no elevators. This is nothing. I mean, it almost resembles the Trade Center,” he says.
—-Re: Climate change: Ben Schafer, a structural engineer at Johns Hopkins University, says civil engineers need to rethink how buildings are designed and how older buildings need to be reassessed. is changing the demands on all of our buildings across the US,” Schafer told CNN. “Sea level rise is one example of something that’s much broader. All of us are experiencing this, and just as we’re experiencing it all our buildings are experiencing it as well. In many cases, they’re facing demands that weren’t anticipated when we designed them in the past.”