In Florida, a solemn search for remains, personal items

The hunt for personal items and the remains of victims of the condo building that collapsed in Surfside, Florida, is painstaking for the searchers.

For the families of loved ones buried under the millions of pounds of cement and twisted steel of what once was the Champlain Towers South, it is worse.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava acknowledged the "anguish'' of families awaiting the identification of their loved ones. "The process is methodical and careful, and it does take time," she said Monday.

The death toll from the June 24 disaster in Surfside rose to 95 on Tuesday, with 14 still unaccounted for, authorities said. Eighty-five of those victims have been identified, officials said, but it could take days until the remaining ones are identified.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said at a press conference Tuesday that American Airlines and the United Way are working together to fly families and deceased family members to and from Surfside, at no cost.

"At this step of the recovery process, we must rely heavily on work of the medical examiner's office," Levine Cava said. "They're undertaking technical and scientific processes to identify the human remains."

Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Dr Emma Lew told The Miami Herald that because of the natural elements and the length of time since the collapse, the remains are deteriorating in ways that make it hard to recover DNA.

"We are getting into a state where we just have bones. It's getting more and more difficult," she said.

Miami-Dade Police teams are working in alternating 12-hour shifts recovering, tagging and storing any items found in the rubble. The items are taken to pods on site and placed in evidence bags that are heat-sealed to prevent anything escaping, said Sergeant Danny Murillo, who leads one team searching for personal belongings.

"As we're sorting through the property, we pretty much separate it between money, firearms, heirlooms, things of value and other things such as religious artifacts," Murillo told the Herald.

Police then mark the bags of evidence with where in the pile it was found — each grid of the collapse zone correlates to a section of the building — and a description of what is in the bags. Religious items, for which a rabbi is helping identify, are separated into different bins.

The bins then get stored in a locked shipping container with its own police surveillance. They are taken to a warehouse to be inspected by detectives for evidence of what may have caused the collapse.

Murillo said he doesn't know when families will be able to retrieve their personal belongings, or those of their loved ones. He doesn't know how many items his teams have sorted through. "This is a massive undertaking," he said. "It's a lot of work."

Officials said Monday that they would tighten security around the site, citing requests from families for items from the ruins.

"We've always had it secure, but we really want to make sure," Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo "Freddy" Ramirez told reporters. "There's a lot of emotion. As families are being notified about their family members, what they say is always about property. People want some sort of connection with their family member, so it's very important that our process that we have in place continues to flow uninterrupted."

"It is the right thing to do because it is obvious that this has become more than a collapsed building site," the mayor said. "It's a holy site."