In the first frantic hours after Champlain Towers South collapsed into a jagged heap of concrete and rebar, rescuers combed through the wreckage searching for signs of life.
There was little chance.
Most of the 135-unit oceanfront condominium complex in Surfside, Florida, had pancaked, one story on top of another, leaving few voids where occupants might have survived.
After initially rescuing four people – one of whom later died – from the top of the rubble, first responders and trained canines detected no other human scents, sounds or movements in the immediate aftermath of the collapse.
Then, just as the sun cast its first rays on the heart-wrenching scene that Thursday morning, June 24, one of the canine crews heard a voice.
It was a female. She was trapped behind a reinforced concrete wall in the underground garage.
Rescuers spent the next 10 hours trying to reach her, wading through contaminated water and chipping through concrete beneath the remaining part of the structure that was teetering on the brink of further collapse.
They almost succeeded.
But as they drew nearer to the victim, a fire broke out. Rescuers were forced to evacuate. She died before they could return.
Little has been made public about the victim, what first responders did to try to save her, or why, ultimately, the operation failed.
Officials initially denied that rescuers heard any voices at all.
It was not until a week after the collapse, when directly questioned about it at a press conference, that Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky briefly spoke about the rescue attempt.
That acknowledgement triggered a wave of media reports that quickly ebbed amid other breaking news.
In the five months since, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, the Miami-Dade Police Department and Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s office refused to provide any details about the rescue effort. They would not answer questions about how the operation unfolded, why the victim could not be reached or who she was.
But public records obtained by The Palm Beach Post and USA TODAY, along with interviews with a federal expert on building collapses and two first responders who took part in the rescue effort, reveal for the first time the grim details of the operation.
They show how the harrowing effort was hampered by repeated equipment failures and a lack of access to proper tools, how rescuers did not have a generator close enough or powerful enough to provide the consistent electricity required to run their equipment. Rescuers also lacked the type of saws designed to keep cool while working around flammable materials.
The reporting also reveals how the fire that thwarted the rescue effort started in the hole rescuers were cutting with sparking tools while trying to reach the victim, how after rescuers breached the wall, the mattress beside her caught fire and couldn’t be quickly extinguished, and how it forced the crew to evacuate, leaving the female trapped.
When it was safe enough for the crew to return, records show, she was dead.
The county mayor’s office, which oversaw rescue efforts at Surfside, said officials have been forthcoming with information.
“Our top priority throughout the entire operation was to be as transparent and clear as possible with the family members and the public about all aspects of the search and rescue operation,” Rachel Johnson, communications director for Levine Cava, wrote in a statement to the USA TODAY Network.
But the USA TODAY Network discovered that the victim's family was never notified about any of it. They didn't know that their loved one had survived the initial collapse, that she communicated with first responders for hours, what she told them in her final moments or how she died.
Johnson, along with fire-rescue and police officials, told the USA TODAY Network that rescuers didn’t even know the victim’s name.
Her name was Valeria Barth Gomez. She had just turned 14.
Valeria was visiting the United States with her parents, Luis Fernando Barth Tobar, 51, and Catalina Ramirez Gomez, 45, both of whom were attorneys in their home country of Colombia.
The family had arrived in Miami on May 22 to visit relatives, attend a tennis event and get their COVID-19 vaccinations. They planned to return to Colombia before June 24 — the day of the collapse — but at some point extended their trip until July 3.
The night of the disaster, the family was staying in Unit 204 — a two-bedroom condo facing north that was owned by Eugenia Szpul de Acevedo, who is also from Colombia.
Szpul de Acevedo did not return requests for comment.
Unit 204 was located in the vertical line of condos that split in half during the collapse, leaving parts of each unit intact and other parts in ruins.
It sat just above the building’s garbage, transformer and electrical rooms, which were on the first floor, according to a detailed analysis of the building plans by Abieyuwa Aghayere, a professor of structural engineering at Drexel University.
Below that were parking spaces in an underground garage.
When the building fell at 1:23 a.m., the primary bedroom where Valeria and her parents were sleeping crashed through the first floor and into the garage, enveloping them in a jumble of furniture, concrete and steel.
It would take more than five hours for rescuers to find them, according to three sets of dispatch records obtained by the USA TODAY Network. Those records include one written log that begins at the time of the collapse and covers the next 19 hours.
They also include two audio dispatch tapes – one starting at the time of the collapse and ending about three hours later; the other beginning somewhere near the launch of the rescue effort in the garage and ending three and a half hours later, before the fire broke out.
Around 4:15 a.m., those records show, search dogs first signaled interest in one area of the garage.
This is around the time that one of the two audio dispatch tapes ends. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue did not explain whether additional recordings exist nor did they provide any despite repeated requests for them by the USA TODAY Network.
It was not until 6:42 a.m. that a canine team reported hearing a possible victim, the written log showed.
“She's banging on some debris,” a rescuer said on the second audio tape.
That discovery triggered a full-scale rescue effort. First responders consulted an engineer, directed additional resources to the garage, requested tools and gathered information from the victim.
Within minutes, she told them she was from unit 204 and was trapped beside a bed.
“She’s advising she’s with her parents,” a rescuer said on the tape. “So, it looks like it's going to be possibly a total of three more victims.
The records do not indicate if either parent survived the initial collapse.
Rescue crews spent the next nine hours working in the garage, sometimes trudging through knee-deep, black water. They erected metal stabilizers to prevent a concrete slab that had crashed through the garage ceiling from crushing them while they worked.
Industrial-sized trash bins, solidly wedged between the fallen ceiling and the garage floor, blocked access to the wall rescuers needed to breach to reach Valeria. Working with their hands, shovels, chipping hammers and electric saws, rescuers excavated the debris near the teenager.
“We need as many chipping hammers as we can get down here,” a rescuer said on an audio tape. “We need to make the hole larger than we thought. ... I have the people, I just need the hammers.”
But they kept losing power. When that happened, electric tools went silent, fans circulating the stagnant air spun to a stop, and the garage went dark.
At 9:51 a.m., structural engineers monitoring the stability of the remaining structure warned of worsening cracks. Officials expanded the exclusion zone, which meant anyone not actively working on rescue efforts needed to back farther away from the building.
Teams working underground asked for “as many people as possible” to help shore up the garage ceiling. They asked for N95 masks, electrical cords, drinking water and a working camera.
“We’ve done an inspection hole. ... We need another camera. The camera down here is inoperable. ... We’ve already started cutting, just assuming she’s behind the inspection hole,” a rescuer said on an audio tape.
Rescuers called for someone to monitor the air for carbon dioxide. They asked for a crew to drain the standing water from the garage. They requested cords long enough to reach a generator on the nearby pool deck to avoid losing precious minutes each time the power failed. They needed tool belts, hammers, rebar cutters and air circulation, they said.
“The breaching operation is going to be prolonged,” a rescuer said on the tape.
They needed two hammers working at once, he said, which would mean they needed a total of eight specially-trained tactical rescue personnel to cover shift rotations for “possibly several hours.”
But they only had six specialists.
“This is all the technical rescue resources we have, so we need to rotate and use them sparingly,” a fire-rescue captain said on the tape.
Fighting through the most trying of conditions, rescuers never gave up, despite the fact the structure could have collapsed on them at any moment, said Lieutenant Gregory E. Roberts, with Florida Task Force 1, whose job it was to oversee safety issues and give direction and guidance to the rescue team in the garage.
“We were having challenges with water, electricity, visibility, constantly checking for structure stability, rotating crews and working on all those things simultaneously,” he said. “We were removing debris, boulders, rocks, furniture. But we could still hear her. They heard her screaming or banging inside.”
But by 11:05 a.m., more than four hours after first making contact, records show, rescuers had lost voice contact with the victim. Dispatchers asked if teams could use a cadaver dog or “live find” dog.
We’ll take both of them — one of each,” a rescuer responded.
A half hour later, a “live find” dog was dispatched to the hole.
“They’re confirming that we still have one live — at least one live,” dispatch said 10 minutes later.
Before rescue efforts could resume, however, a hazmat team needed to check the area. They discussed the pressing need to drain the water from the garage. Broken pipes from the pool appeared to be leaking into the basement, they said.
Seven minutes later, records show, rescue operations resumed.
“We weren’t able to locate anything with the camera, but we did hear some moaning, so we have a better idea,” a rescuer said on a tape. “So we can start breaching now.”
But that would not happen. Less than two minutes later, the power went out yet again.
Workers still needed a generator, they said. They still needed rebar cutters, needed air.
And then it got worse.
The second audio tape ends at this point, so it is impossible to hear what happened next. Once again, fire-rescue officials did not explain whether additional recordings exist nor did they provide any. But written records tell the rest of the story.
At 1:42 p.m., a log entry showed two words: ACTIVE FIRE
It was the mattress next to Valeria.
Photos and videos of rescuers show large amounts of sparks spitting in all directions from the power tools.
“Most concrete cutting saws require water to flow within the blade cutting area to remove debris and keep the blade from dulling, with the additional benefit of reducing sparks and the resulting chance of combusting any surrounding material,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency said in a statement to the USA TODAY Network.
But rescuers at the time did not have the type of electric saws that enable water to flow through to cool them, Roberts said. So, they had to make do with what they did have. And they could not extinguish the mattress fire with the water from the garage floor because it was contaminated with potentially flammable substances. Instead, they had to request a “watering can” to douse the flames.
Roberts said he was not there when the fire broke out but noted that any number of things could have started it.
“We could never determine the cause of the fire,” he said. “We were in knee deep water, electrical hazards, fuel, cars in there, oil, debris. We had a bunch of stuff we could not negate.”
The Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department would not confirm the cause of the fire. The Miami-Dade Police Department, which handled the death investigations, did not respond to several requests for answers.
Seven minutes after the fire was reported, rescue crews had evacuated the garage as firefighters attempted to control the smoke and flames.
A half hour later, another fire that “may have started in the basement” broke out, the log showed, filling the crawl space and second floor with smoke.
Firefighters battled the flames for at least 90 minutes. At times, they said, the fires appeared to be suppressed, but then they would smolder again.
By 4:21 p.m., a camera search of the excavated area where Valeria was trapped showed no sign of life. Rescuers called for a search dog.
Twenty minutes later, the log showed, there was “no hit” from the dog.
First responders broke down the equipment shoring up the garage ceiling and called a meeting at their command center.
At a press conference less than an hour later, Assistant Fire Chief Ray Jadallah told reporters that rescuers had never heard a voice in the rubble.
“We did receive sounds, not necessarily people talking, but sounds,” he said.
Three days later, another Miami-Dade County fire-rescue official said the same thing.
“We have not specifically heard any signs of life in the wreckage,” she told reporters. “We hear noises, and we explain to the family as well, noises don’t mean human noises.”
What officials said — or did not say — about hearing a voice
Within the span of one week, fire-rescue officials twice deny, then acknowledge, hearing a survivor in the rubble.
Miami-Dade Police Department and Wendy Rhodes, USA TODAY NETWORK
Sixteen days after the collapse, on July 10, first responders recovered the bodies of Luis Fernando Barth Tobar and Catalina Ramirez Gomez.
The following day, they found Valeria.
Her remains, the medical examiner's report showed, consisted of a “mound of dirt” and some “focally charred” bones.
Valeria’s death was devastating not just to her family. It also took a toll on first responders who risked their own lives trying to save her — especially those who formed personal connections with her during the rescue effort.
Forging a personal connection with a victim is a valuable tool, FEMA wrote in an email to the USA TODAY Network, because “it makes the survivor an active participant in their own rescue operation and can help strengthen their own survival instinct.”
As such, the department wrote, a victim's name is “often the first type of information exchanged” between Urban Search and Rescue teams and victims trapped in collapsed buildings. Engaging a victim by name also helps rescuers involve entrapped survivors in conversation to “gather information about themselves, their medical condition, nature of entrapment, and anything else pertinent to the operation,” FEMA wrote.
In a June 28 email to four colleagues, Miami-Dade County Battalion Chief Michael A. Rossman wrote that, in his own prior experiences with victims trapped in cars, in only 20 minutes he “knew their names, if they were married, and the names of their kids.”
He also wrote about the mental toll the rescue effort took on first responders who “were involved with active conversation with the female trapped next to the bed for 10-11 hours after the collapse.”
Officers “saw the wind knocked out” of some of the rescuers, as can happen after “developing a relationship with a victim like this” and then having that victim die, Rossman wrote. He recommended wellness checks on affected team members.
Roberts, who was in charge of safety during the rescue operation, said he never learned the name of the victim and was too far away to hear her voice. But he said he is still troubled by her death.
“I know nothing about her,” he said softly. “It’s best that way. It’s just hard to know we didn’t get to her on time.”
Brandon Webb, a program manager for Florida Task Force 1, who also worked on the team trying to free Valeria, said he never heard anyone mention her by name. Still, he said, rescuers risked their lives doing heroic things trying to save her.
“Going in that building was stupid risky,” he said. “It’s risky, and we do everything we can to mitigate the risk. What we try to do is the most good in the shortest amount of time.”
Valeria’s family declined to speak for this story. They filed one of the dozens of lawsuits against the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association and various other entities for their alleged roles in the collapse.
Carlos Silva, an attorney whose firm is representing Valeria’s aunt and 14 other families in wrongful death suits related to the collapse, confirmed that officials never told Valeria’s family about efforts to save the teenager.
“The info is very sensitive and should go to the family,” Silva said. “They are entitled to know as much or as little as they want.”
But that information was difficult to come by. In the weeks following the collapse, county officials provided the USA TODAY Network with troves of documents in response to multiple public records requests. But as reporters began to focus on details about the rescue effort and the identity of the victim in the garage, officials were less forthcoming.
For months, police and fire-rescue officials, as well as the county mayor’s office, ignored numerous requests for records seeking those details. In at least one instance, they denied the existence of records that they later provided after a USA TODAY Network attorney sent a demand letter.
Only the county medical examiner’s office agreed to speak to the USA TODAY Network. During the mid-August interview, Director of Operations Darren Caprara said it was possible some of the victims died from causes other than blunt force trauma, as officials had claimed.
After that interview, Johnson, from Mayor Levine Cava’s office, ordered all further communications between the USA TODAY Network and the county’s fire-rescue department and medical examiner’s office to be directed through the mayor’s office.
USA TODAY continued to send requests directly to county departments, but Johnson intercepted them. She ignored some requests, said some records did not exist, and refused to allow employees from county departments to answer questions from the USA TODAY Network.
The network was able to talk with the first responders quoted in this story only by calling them directly. Roberts was among them.
“It’s unsettling and frustrating,” he said of efforts to save Valeria. “We were not successful at our mission, but we did our best.”
Roberts said first responders knew from the way the building collapsed that the likelihood of finding survivors would be slim. In the end, they found 98 people dead.
But Valeria had given them hope.
“It’s just hard to know we didn’t get to her on time,” he said. “All of us would at least like to have saved one – to say we rescued one out of there.”
Contributing: Javier Zarracina, Veronica Bravo and Abieyuwa Aghayere, professor of structural engineering at Drexel University
"save" - Google News
December 09, 2021 at 05:30PM
https://ift.tt/3EEWvax
Surfside rescuers heard her voice, tried for hours to save her. Then officials buried her story. - USA TODAY
"save" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2SvBSrf
https://ift.tt/2zJxCxA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Surfside rescuers heard her voice, tried for hours to save her. Then officials buried her story. - USA TODAY"
Post a Comment