Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Sunday evening that the death toll in the Surfside building collapse stood at nine. Four more bodies were found and identified, while 152 people remained unaccounted for. She said 134 people had been accounted for, although no one has been pulled alive from the rubble since Thursday, the day of collapse.
Sunday marked another day of searching through the treacherous debris. Levine Cava said family members were allowed to visit the site to watch the rescue efforts and pay their respects.
“We are cutting a deep trench to assist us. It is now 125 feet in length into the pile. It is 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep,” Levine Cava said. “This trench is very critical to the continuation of the search and rescue process.”
As details of the building’s possible preexisting conditions emerged Sunday, a lawyer confirmed to CBS News that a Surfside official had told the building’s residents in 2018 that “it appears the building is in very good shape.”
On Saturday, the city of Surfside released an engineering report from 2018 that warned that the building had major structural worries. It is unclear if any of the issues in the report — from Morabito Consultants — caused the collapse, and it didn’t warn of imminent danger, although it said repairs were needed.
Waterproofing failed under the pool deck and wasn’t properly laid, so water didn’t drain, the report said. “The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,” it said.
It also said there was “abundant cracking” in concrete columns, beams and walls in the parking garage. The consultant estimated that the repairs needed to address the building’s structural issues would have cost more than $9 million.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
