Miami-Dade County Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said during the initial search and rescue efforts hours after the collapse, teams did hear the voice of a female trapped in the Surfside condo rubble – however they were unable to reach her. During a news conference on Thursday, Cominsky was asked about a female voice that was heard in the first few hours after the collapse. He said they heard “audible sounds” of a female voice during their initial search and rescue efforts while working underneath the condo structure. Cominsky said they heard the woman’s voice for several hours and kept searching until she could no longer be heard. “Eventually we didn’t hear her voice anymore, we continued to search,” he said. “Again… that’s emphasizing the magnitude of what we’re going through.”

The number of deaths following the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida, has grown to 18, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said this evening during a news conference. “I’m pained to tell you we found two additional bodies in the rubble, which brings our total count to 18 – 18 fatalities. It is also with great sorrow, real pain, that I have to share with you that two of these were children. Aged 4 and 10. Any loss of life, especially given the unexpected, unprecedented nature of this event is a tragedy, but the loss of our children is too great to bear,” she said.

Thousands of people were moved by the account of Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett of encountering a 12-year-old girl saying Tehillim by herself at the site of the Champlain collapse. The girl, Elisheva Cohen was saying Tehillim for her father Dr. Brad (Yaakov Reuven Hakohen) Cohen, and her uncle, Dr. Gary (Tzvi Nosson Hakohen), both missing since the collapse, Collive reported. The two brothers are both physicians who became Torah observant as adults. Brad lives in in Bay Harbor, Florida, and Gary in Birmingham, Alabama. “It all began one day in the bank 25 years ago,” recalls Rabbi Yaakov Saacks, who directs the Jewish Chai Center in Dix Hills, N.Y., where the Cohens had grown up.

Over the last few days, additional members of the Home Front Command have joined the IDF and Israeli Foreign Ministry delegation in Miami. Joining the delegation were rescuers, engineers and population behavior officers, who are in Miami to reinforce and assist the delegation members who arrived last week. To assist the effort, the operational analysis team of the Intelligence Directorate’s “Unit 9900”, which specializes in visual intelligence, built a three-dimensional (3-D) model that maps the collapsed building in order to streamline the process of locating the missing persons at the site of the disaster. The initial delegation arrived at the destruction site in the first 72 hours after the building collapsed. As of today, the Israeli delegation has 15 members at the site.

Crews were still working around the clock to try to locate possible survivors of the Surfside condominium collapse as the desperate search reached its seventh day Wednesday. The death toll from the Champlain Towers South Condo rose to 16 Wednesday after four more bodies were discovered. Another 149 people still unaccounted for. Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Ray Jadallah told family members at a morning briefing that rescuers found the four bodies Tuesday night. He said the victims’ next of kin had not yet been identified. Jadallah said that in addition to those four bodies, crews also found other human remains. (AP)

The Commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit said search and rescue personnel found more bodies overnight in the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida. “At the last 12 hours we found some more people,” Colonel Golan Vach, Commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit, told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day” Wednesday. “We found people. Unfortunately, they are not alive.” Vach said first-responders discovered new tunnels in the rubble Tuesday night, which allowed for the discovery of more bodies. Vach said search and rescue teams were working in the space between the collapsed balconies.

The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials abruptly retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system. The bungle was a black mark on New York City’s first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the city’s Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system. The disarray began as evening fell, when the board withdrew data it had released earlier in the day purporting to be a first round of results from the ranked choice system.

As the search for survivors continues at the site of the Surfside disaster, relatives of those missing endure an agonizing wait. As hour after hour ticks by, despair hangs heavily over the rubble of the building, with its shattered stones a reflection of shattered hearts. Chaim Rosenberg, 52, a businessman and philanthropist from Brooklyn, purchased a condo in Champlain Towers only last month after enduring an extremely difficult year, during which he lost his wife to cancer and both of his parents to the coronavirus, Chabad.org reported. Chaim has been working in recent months on a tzadaka project in memory of his wife, the launching of Mercaz Shalom, a mental rehabilitation center for young adults, on the campus of Maaynaei Hayeshua Hospital in Bnei Brak.

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.

“The best way to understand how “Jewish” Surfside is is simply to stroll along Collins Avenue and count the shuls,” Rav Leibel Groner, the head of the Chevra Kadisha in Miami told Yated Ne’eman. Lists with the names of the missing and their names for tefillah were hung in every shul in the area, which were all filled to capacity on Shabbos. So many mispallelim showed up at The Shul, which is close to Champlain Towers, that two security guards stationed themselves at the entrance and turned people away. Fortunately, there are more shuls on the next street. “It felt like Yom Kippur, there wasn’t one empty place in all the shuls,” Rav Groner said. Silence reigned in The Shul. One Jew, Ada, who is not yet frum, said tearfully that she just had to show up for davening.