Florida authorities said Saturday that an ongoing fire beneath the rubble makes it harder for them to search for survivors at the Surfside condo building collapse site.
“It’s a very deep fire,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said. “It’s extremely difficult to locate the source of the fire. So, they’ve been working around the clock, these fire rescue teams, these brave men and women, under the rubble to fix this problem so they can get on, but it is hampering our search efforts.”
The mayor added that since the blaze erupted, it spread throughout the biggest part of the wreck.
“Obviously, the smoke itself is the biggest barrier right now to proceeding in those areas. Se we created a trench using heavy equipment to try to isolate the fire and continue searching for the victims in the part of the pile that we can access. No further victims have been found.”
More than 150 people remain unaccounted for as of Saturday morning with a death toll of four. Fire-Rescue Chief Alan Cominsky said that using sonar equipment to detect sounds underneath the pile had been turning out futile for a while.
“And again, when we say sounds, it’s not distinct…it’s just things that we hear so we focus on that area as we’re doing our search. And no, we haven’t heard anything different in regards to the sounds.”
