WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Surfside, Fla. Thursday to meet with first responders and family members of people who went missing a week after a condo collapse.
The visit comes after a large section of the 12-story Champlain Towers South just outside of Miami collapsed around 1:30 a.m. last Thursday morning. So far, 18 deaths have been confirmed and 145 people remain missing.
Biden will receive a briefing from Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Governor Ron DeSantis – a Republican and ally of former President Donald Trump – as well as first responders and other local leaders.
The president will also thank the search and rescue teams and meet with families who have lost or missing loved ones. He will make remarks at 3:50 p.m. before returning to Washington.
The White House said Biden did not visit the site immediately, fearing that a visit from the president would disrupt rescue efforts.
Hundreds of workers – including rescue teams from Israel and Mexico – were dispatched to the construction site to dig through the unstable heap of rubble in hopes of finding more survivors. Florida authorities have described a grueling rescue process as workers attempt to move millions of pounds of concrete in the summer heat and tropical rainstorms disrupt their efforts. A rescue worker was rushed to hospital Tuesday for dehydration.
While visiting Dallas on Tuesday, Jill Biden said she and the president were going to Florida to “comfort these families,” and said their hearts are breaking for those affected by the collapse.
During times of national tragedy, Biden has often turned to his own experiences of grief and loss to comfort others. Biden’s first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. His son Beau Biden died of a brain tumor in 2015.
The Bidens will arrive in Florida as there are still many questions unanswered which led to the condo building collapsing in the middle of the night last week.
In a 2018 report, an engineering consultant hired to get a head start on a 40-year recertification process required by Miami-Dade County’s building codes warned that there were “frequent cracks” and debris in the subsurface give the building’s multi-storey car park and that there has been “considerable structural damage to the concrete slab below these areas”.
People view a memorial that contains pictures of some of the missing from the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South Condo building on June 30, 2021 in Surfside, Flora.Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The condominium’s president wrote a letter to residents in April – just three months before the collapse – warning that the problems described in the 2018 report had worsened and that the damage would “multiply exponentially.”
Local residents said they were not informed of the report. A resident told NBC News that a Surfside building official said at a meeting in 2018 that “the building was not in poor condition.”
The Miami chief prosecutor announced Monday that she would ask a grand jury to investigate the collapse, although it is unclear when this trial will begin.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan said Wednesday that the agency is monitoring the air around the building’s collapse site for toxic particles that could harm those involved in the rescue effort and people around the area.
Regan said the agency still doesn’t have enough information to determine if the building collapse was partly caused by climate change.
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