The first Atlantic hurricane of the year, Hurricane Elsa, roared through the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles islands on Friday morning. Elsa intensified into a category 1 storm with 75 mph winds while passing just south of Barbados at 7:15 a.m. EDT Friday. Elsa 35-mph increase in winds in the 24 hours ending at 8 a.m. EDT Friday met the National Hurricane Center’s minimum definition of rapid intensification.
The Meteorological Service of Barbados reported sustained winds of 74 mph, gusting to 86 mph, near 7:30 a.m. EDT, as the northern eyewall of Elsa passed over the southern portion of the island. The Barbados airport reported top sustained winds of 63 mph, gusting to 86 mph, at 7:18 a.m. EDT. Elsa brought heavy rains to the island; the highest rainfall amount from the Weather Underground personal weather station network on Barbados was 4.68” as of 11 a.m. EDT Friday.
At 2 p.m. EDT Friday, Elsa was centered 95 miles west-northwest of the island of St. Vincent, speeding west-northwest at 29 mph across the eastern Caribbean. The Hurricane Hunters found that Elsa was continuing to intensify, with top winds of 85 mph and a central pressure of 991 mb.
Elsa had gained some latitude since Thursday, and it was positioned at 13.7°N. This position farther from the equator will help aid development, as will warm sea-surface temperatures near 28 degrees Celsius (82°F), moderate wind shear of 10-20 knots, and a moist atmosphere with a mid-level relative humidity of 65% (though water vapor satellite images showed dry air on the northwest side of the storm getting wrapped into Elsa’s circulation). The main factor discouraging development through Saturday will be Elsa’s rapid forward speed, which will make it difficult for the storm to stay vertically aligned.
Wind damage and flooding are both a concern from Elsa in the Lesser Antilles. Elsa’s heavy rains are particularly a concern on the island of St. Vincent, where ash from a series of eruptions April 9-22 from the Soufrière volcano could potentially mobilize into dangerous mud flows. Radar-estimated rainfall amounts on the island from the Barbados radar were 1-4 inches as of 2 p.m. EDT Friday.
Because of the fast forward speed of Elsa, tropical storm-force winds were mostly confined to the northern side of the center, and areas to the south of the center likely received little wind damage.
Figure 1. Radar image of Elsa at 7:40 a.m. EDT July 2, 2021, as the hurricane’s northern eyewall was affecting Barbados. (Image credit: Weather Service of Barbados)
An unusually early Caribbean hurricane
Elsa is the first hurricane of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, and its formation comes more than a month before the average August 10 appearance of the season’s first hurricane (the 1991-2020 average date for the first Atlantic hurricane formation was August 14, according to Phil Klotzbach). Elsa is the earliest-appearing hurricane in nine years, since Hurricane Chris formed 700 miles southeast of Newfoundland on June 21, 2012, according to Brian McNoldy (he doesn’t count Hurricane Alex of January 2016, seeing that anomalous hurricane as a left-over from the 2015 season). Elsa is the earliest hurricane observed in the Caribbean since Hurricane Alma of May 20, 1970.
A harbinger of an active hurricane season?
It is concerning that Elsa formed early in the season in the main development region (MDR) for hurricanes (between the coast of Africa and Central America, including the Caribbean). A tropical cyclone (the generic term for all hurricanes, tropical storms, and tropical depressions) forming in this region early in the season is typically a harbinger of an active peak part of the season, as it shows the atmosphere and ocean are conducive for activity. In the comments from our previous post, NCHurricane2009 provided a detailed analysis of this, studying the last 13 Atlantic seasons where a tropical cyclone developed in the MDR in June or July. Of these 13 seasons, 10 were active, and only three could be characterized as inactive. The active seasons are highlighted in bold below:
– 2020: Gonzalo formed in July (30 named storms); – 2018: Beryl formed in July (16 named storms; Florence and Michael were high-impact storms); – 2017: Bret formed in June; TD 4 and Don formed in July (17 named storms; Harvey, Irma, and Maria were high-impact storms); – 2014: TD2 formed in July (9 named storms); – 2013: Chantal formed in July (14 named storms, but only 2 hurricanes, and no major hurricanes); – 2008: Bertha formed in July (16 named storms, 8 hurricanes, 5 major hurricanes; Dolly, Gustav, Ike, Omar, and Paloma were high-impact hurricanes); – 2005: Dennis, Emily formed in July (28 named storms; Dennis, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Stan, and Wilma were high-impact hurricanes); – 2003: TD2 formed in June (16 named storms; Isabel was a high-impact hurricane); – 2001: TD2 formed in July (15 named storms) – 2000: TD2 formed in June (15 named storms) – 1998: Alex formed in July (14 named storms; Bonnie, Georges, and Mitch were a high-impact hurricanes); – 1997: TD5 formed in July (9 named storms); and – 1996: Bertha and Cesar formed in July (13 named storms; Fran and Hortense were major-impact hurricanes).
Figure 2. Tracks of all hurricanes observed in the Caribbean in the months of March-July from 1851-2020. A total of 20 early-season hurricanes have been observed. (Image credit: NOAA)
The tropics typically are quiet in July: Since the beginning of the satellite era (1966), there have been 71 tropical storms, 28 hurricanes, and four major hurricanes during July in the Atlantic – an average of one named storm every 1.5 years, one hurricane every two years, and one major hurricane every 14 years (thanks go to Tony Brite for these stats). Since 1851, a total of 20 hurricanes have been observed in the Caribbean in the months of March-July – only about one every eight years (Figure 2).
Figure 3. Predicted wind speed (colors) and sea level pressure (black lines) for Tropical Storm Elsa at 8 a.m. EDT (12Z) Sunday, July 4, from the 12Z Friday, July 2, run of the HWRF model. The model predicted Elsa would be affecting Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a low-end category 3 hurricane with 115 mph winds and a central pressure of 969 mb. This intensity forecast is near the high end of what the intensity forecast models are predicting. (Image credit: Tropical Tidbits)
Forecast for Elsa
As it progresses west-northwest at 20-30 mph Friday through Saturday, Elsa will mostly stay south of the dry air from the Saharan Air Layer, though water vapor imagery showed that some dry air on the northwest side of Elsa could interfere with development. Conditions will be favorable for development, according to the 12Z Friday run of the SHIPS model, with moderate wind shear of 10-20 knots and steadily rising sea surface temperatures. Development of Elsa will be favored also by a large-scale region of ascending air over the Atlantic, caused by the passage Friday of an atmospheric disturbance called a Convectively Coupled Kelvin Wave, as explained in a Tweet by Eric Webb.
However, the fast forward speed of Elsa is likely to inhibit development, as fast-moving storms have trouble keeping their cores vertically aligned. The 12Z Friday run of the SHIPS model gave a 28% chance that Elsa would rapidly intensify by 35 mph into a high-end category 2 hurricane with 110 mph winds, in the 24 hours ending at 8 a.m. EDT Saturday. The National Hurricane Center predicted little change in Elsa’s strength through Saturday.
Figure 4. Track forecasts out to eight days for Elsa from the 6Z (2 a.m. EDT) Friday, July 2, run of the GFS ensemble model (GEFS). The black line is the mean of the 31 ensemble members; individual ensemble member forecasts are the thin lines, color-coded by the central pressure they predict for Elsa. The guidance has shifted more to the west than was the case 24 hours earlier, and it predicts a greater threat to western Cuba and the U.S. Gulf Coast than before. But there was high uncertainty on the future track of Elsa beyond Monday morning (72 hours). (Image credit: Tropical Tidbits)
As Elsa approaches southwestern Haiti, Jamaica, and eastern Cuba on Saturday night, the storm’s forward speed will slow to about 20 mph, which may aid Elsa’s intensification by allowing the storm to get more vertically aligned. However, the storm will begin interacting with the high terrain of Hispaniola at this time, which will likely inhibit development. At some point, Elsa is likely to cross over one or more of the mountainous islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica, or Cuba, which is likely to significantly disrupt the storm. Southern portions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are likely to receive dangerous flooding rains of 4-8 inches Saturday through Sunday, and these heavy rains will spread into Jamaica and eastern Cuba beginning on Saturday evening.
On Monday, a trough of low pressure passing to the north of Elsa is expected to turn the storm to the north, resulting in landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast, most likely in Florida. The magnitude of the threat to the U.S. is difficult to assess until it is apparent how much interaction Elsa will have with the high mountains of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica.
Bob Henson contributed to this post.
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Afghanistan’s district administrator for Bagram, Darwaish Raufi, said the American departure was done overnight without any coordination with local officials, and as a result early Friday dozens of local looters stormed through the unprotected gates before Afghan forces regained control.
“They were stopped and some have been arrested and the rest have been cleared from the base,” Raufi told The Associated Press, adding that the looters ransacked several buildings before being arrested and the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces (ANDSF) took control.
“Unfortunately the Americans left without any coordination with Bagram district officials or the governor’s office,” Raufi said. “Right now our Afghan security forces are in control both inside and outside of the base.”
The deputy spokesman for the defense minister, Fawad Aman, said nothing of the early morning looting. He said only the base has been handed over and the “ANDSF will protect the base and use it to combat terrorism.”
The withdrawal from Bagram Airfield is the clearest indication that the last of the 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops have left Afghanistan or are nearing a departure, months ahead of President Joe Biden’s promise that they would be gone by Sept. 11.
It was clear soon after the mid-April announcement that the U.S. was ending its “forever war,” that the departure of U.S. soldiers and their estimated 7,000 NATO allies would be nearer to July 4, when America celebrates its Independence Day.
Most NATO soldiers have already quietly exited as of this week. Announcements from several countries analyzed by The Associated Press show that a majority of European troops has now left with little ceremony — a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.
The U.S. has refused to say when the last U.S. soldier would leave Afghanistan, citing security concerns, but also the protection of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport is still being negotiated. Turkish and U.S. soldiers currently are protecting the airport. That protection is currently covered under the Resolute Support Mission, which is the military mission being wound down.
Until a new agreement for the airport’s protection is negotiated between Turkey and the Afghan government, and possibly the United States, the Resolute Support mission would appear to have to continue in order to give international troops the legal authority.
The U.S. will also have about 650 troops in Afghanistan to protect its sprawling embassy in the capital. Their presence it is understood will be covered in a bilateral agreement with the Afghan government.
The U.S. and NATO leaving comes as Taliban insurgents make strides in several parts of the country, overrunning dozens of districts and overwhelming beleaguered Afghan security Forces.
In a worrying development, the government has resurrected militias with a history of brutal violence to assist the Afghan security forces. At what had all the hallmarks of a final press conference, Gen. Miller this week warned that continued violence risked a civil war in Afghanistan that should have the world worried.
At its peak around 2012, Bagram Airfield saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops pass through its sprawling compound barely an hour’s drive north of the Afghan capital Kabul.
The Soviet Union built the airfield in the 1950s. When it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to back a communist government, it turned it into its main base from which it would defend its occupation of the country. For 10 years, the Soviets fought the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, dubbed freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, who saw them as a front-line force in one of the last Cold War battles.
When the U.S. and NATO inherited Bagram in 2001, they found it in ruins, a collection of crumbling buildings, gouged by rockets and shells, most of its perimeter fence wrecked. It had been abandoned after being battered in the battles between the Taliban and rival mujahedeen warlords fleeing to their northern enclaves.
The enormous base has two runways. The most recent, at 12,000 feet long, was built in 2006 at a cost of $96 million. There are 110 revetments, which are basically parking spots for aircraft, protected by blast walls. GlobalSecurity, a security think tank, says Bagram includes three large hangars, a control tower and numerous support buildings. The base has a 50-bed hospital with a trauma bay, three operating theaters and a modern dental clinic. Another section houses a prison, notorious and feared among Afghans.
There was no immediate comment from Afghan officials as to the final withdrawal from Bagram Airfield by the U.S. and its NATO allies.
Tropical Storm Elsa strengthened into the first hurricane of the 2021 Atlantic storm season on Friday, threatening to unleash flooding and landslides in the Caribbean.
The storm could impact Florida early next week and officials are urging residents to make preparations.
Sustained winds were near 75 mph, making the storm a Category 1 hurricane, according to an 11 a.m. advisory from the National Hurricane Center. Hurricane Elsa was located 5 miles south of St. Vincent and was moving west-northwest at 29 mph.
Elsa became the earliest E storm on record, beating out Edouard, which formed July 6, 2020. Elsa is the fifth named storm of the season in the Atlantic.
The Florida Public Radio Emergency Network said Elsa could turn north and weaken after strengthening into a hurricane.
Even though a track into the eastern Gulf is most likely, Elsa could potentially track northward over the Florida Peninsula – or even just to the east of the Sunshine State, according to AccuWeather forecasters.
There is a risk of storm surge, wind and rainfall impacts to the Florida Keys and portions of Florida early next week, the Hurricane Center said.
“Impacts to the contiguous United States would begin Monday night at the earliest after the system passes through the Caribbean. Residents from the central Gulf Coast, across Florida and to the Carolina coast should monitor the progress of Elsa,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Adam Douty.
The forecast uncertainty remains larger than usual because of Elsa’s potential interaction with the Greater Antilles over the weekend.
AccuWeather predicts 15 inches of rain in Cuba and Florida from late in the weekend into early next week. Where the heaviest rain pours down will depend on the exact track of Elsa, but significant rain can occur well away from the center of the storm.
Hurricane warnings were issued for Barbados, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Officials in St. Vincent and the Grenadines closed schools, businesses and an international airport on Friday. Heavy rains and winds were already lashing Barbados, which imposed similar closures late Thursday.
Authorities opened dozens of shelters in St. Vincent and urged people to evacuate if they lived near a valley, given the threat of flash flooding, mudslides and lahars, especially in the northern part of the island where La Soufrière volcano is located.
Track Hurricane Elsa
Contributing: Doyle Rice and N’dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
SURFSIDE, Fla. – Iliana Monteagudo sprang awake in her sixth-floor unit in the Champlain Tower South condominiums with the strange sensation that her home was swaying.
A strong breeze billowed through the two-bedroom condo, and Monteagudo, disoriented with sleep, thought maybe she’d left a balcony door open. The sliding glass door was open, but as she tried to close it, she noticed it had jumped off its track.
She heard a loud crack behind her. She turned to see the wall of her living room dividing into two, the gap widening as it snaked toward the floor.
A single thought bellowed through her: “Run!”
She pulled on a dress, grabbed her wallet and pillbox, blew out a candle she had lit earlier to a statuette of the Virgen de Guadalupe and ran into the hallway. She didn’t bother to put on a bra.
“Something inside me said, ‘If you put on a bra, those three seconds will be crucial,’” Monteagudo, 64, said. “I just ran.”
Three floors above her, Raysa Rodriguez awoke to a similar feeling of her building “swaying like a sheet of paper.” She grabbed her cellphone and ran into the darkened hallway. A concrete column pierced the hallway, and the doors to the elevators were gone.
Rodriguez opened a door to the outside stairwell and was hit by a terrifying sight: The entire beachside part of her building had crumpled into a heap of jagged rubble. She screamed.
Monteagudo and Rodriguez were among the more fortunate ones: They survived the collapse of the 12-story building. But the terror of June 24 didn’t end when the concrete building fell to earth with more than 160 people inside. For days, it followed relatives of residents who clung to hope that their loved ones could be found alive. It trailed survivors who struggled to untangle the knot of pain and confusion wrought from losing everything but their lives.
The confirmed death toll Thursday afternoon was 18, including two children, ages 4 and 10, who were found Wednesday. Nearly 150 residents remained missing.
As President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the disaster zone, search-and-rescue teams temporarily halted rescue efforts out of concern about the instability of a condo section still standing, further dimming family members’ hopes of their loved ones’ recovery. The rescue efforts restarted later in the afternoon.
Over the past week, the area around the collapsed condo building has been a hub of desolate activity, from search-and-rescue teams discovering body parts to rabbis consoling distraught family members to survivors pondering what to do next and pushing back anxiety.
Kevin Spiegel flew back from a business trip last week to find a warlike zone where his beachside condo once stood. His wife was among the missing.
He was in California when he woke up early on the morning of June 24 and found a string of alarming emails, including one from Surfside police, saying there had been an incident at the building where he lived with this wife, Judy Spiegel, 65.
“I opened the link and thought, wait, that’s my building,’” Spiegel said.
The family held on to hope that his wife was still alive, trapped in a concrete pocket among all the heavy, jagged debris. But Thursday, as they readied to meet Biden, reality began crashing in on them, and the suspension of rescue efforts served another gut punch.
“At this point, we realize it would take a miracle,” Spiegel said.
‘It was dragged down’
The 40-year-old building, which had a documented history of structural issues, began to shudder and sway sometime past 1 a.m., according to witnesses and 911 calls.
At around 1:30 a.m. EDT, the central portion of the condominium suddenly fell, according to surveillance video footage. The remaining eastern portion stood for about nine more seconds, then wobbled before it, too, crashed to the ground in a cloud of dust.
“The eastern side did its best to stay up,” said Roberto Leon, a construction engineering professor at Virginia Tech who has reviewed the footage. “It was almost human, trying to remain standing, but ultimately it was dragged down.”
The first calls came into the 911 dispatch center around 1:30 a.m., according to emergency radio transmissions acquired by WPLG-TV in Miami.
“Attention: Building collapse at 88th Street and Collins Avenue. Standby for dispatch,” a dispatcher said.
“People are evacuating,” another dispatcher can be heard saying, “said they sound like they heard a bomb.”
As the first emergency crews arrived, they sized up the enormity of the disaster over the crackling line of their radios.
“The building is gone. No elevators. There’s nothing,” one firefighter reported. Then, drawing comparisons to the 9/11 New York City terrorist attacks: “It almost resembles the Trade Center.”
Another firefighter: “We have people on the balcony shouting that they are trapped in their apartments and no interior way for them to escape and there is a danger of collapse.”
Soon the scene swarmed with blinking blue lights and firefighters and an array of first responders, all trying to figure out how to pull humans from the mounds of jagged concrete and stranded on balconies.
‘Please, God, help me!’
When Rodriguez screamed at the sight of her collapsed building, a woman trapped in the rubble heard her voice and cried out, “Please help me!” Rodriguez recounted her experience in a class-action lawsuit filed this week against the building’s condo association.
As she retreated to her condo to get dressed, neighbors showed up at her door, including a woman escaping with her 10-year-old son and Maltese puppy. Together, they made their way down the stairwell, helping an elderly neighbor. The first-floor door was blocked by rubble, forcing them back up to the second floor, where they found an open unit and escaped through a balcony.
Monteagudo’s escape took a lonelier path. She was alone as she dashed into the darkened hallway. It was eerily quiet. There was no alarm, no residents scrambling for safety.
She leaned an ear to the door directly across from her, belonging to Hilda Noreiga, an elderly woman who had befriended Monteagudo when she moved in in December.
When she heard silence, Monteagudo assumed Noreiga was visiting her son, Carlos Noreiga, the police chief in nearby North Bay Village, and moved on. A week later, Hilda Noreiga’s remains were identified in the rubble.
Monteagudo scampered down the far stairwell. As she approached the fourth floor, a thunderous boom filled the empty stairwell. She knew the building was collapsing.
“Please, God, help me!” she screamed. “I don’t want to die! I want to see my children! I want to see my grandchildren! Please, God, don’t let me die!”
Summoning her strength, she continued down the stairwell and reached the lobby, where a security guard helped her out the door and over a wall to the safety of the street.
She approached a young man filming the scene with his iPhone. She didn’t have any money or her cellphone to call an Uber. The man agreed to drive her to a relative’s home in South Beach.
“God had another mission for me,” Monteagudo said.
Moshe Candiotti, a 67-year-old retiree originally from Israel who has lived in the Miami area for 40 years, awoke in his fourth-floor apartment when he felt the building shudder. Then came the boom.
He ran down the stairs and saw an elderly woman, scared and clenching to the ramp. He helped her exit as others made their way to the street as fast as they could.
Candiotti, a former bodega owner, moved into the building in 2019. He said he only had made two or three friends because of the COVID-19 pandemic but was very sad about the loss of lives.
Candiotti said he was worried about the families. The shock took him back to his time serving in the army during the 1973 Yom Kippur War (1973 Arab-Israeli war), where his job on the southern border between Israel and Egypt was to pull bodies out and retrieve them.
“When you experience trauma, your mind doesn’t respond the same way,” he said. “It comes later.”
‘I knew that they were gone’
Cassie Stratton was a light sleeper. She woke up in her fourth-floor condo in the Champlain Tower South because of the sound of the ground outside cracking, her sister, Ashley Dean, said.
At around 1:30 a.m., she went out onto the balcony to call her husband, Michael Stratton, who was on a business trip in Washington, D.C. She told him the pool was caving in and the ground was shaking. She then let out a scream and the line went dead.
“My guts are just ripped out of my chest,” Dean said. “My sister was just so beautiful. Not just visually beautiful, but emotionally beautiful and spiritually beautiful, and she’s a person that was blessed with all the packages of a woman. She was a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a best friend. She was glamorous. She was talented. She was happy. She was healthy. She was kind.”
Dean said her sister complained about the condition of the parking garage because she had a new Porsche and she didn’t like parking it in the underground garage, which was often wet and dirty. But she didn’t expect the building was at risk of collapse.
“They had no idea of just what exactly was brewing underneath there,” she said.
Phoenix resident Nicholas Balboa, who was on a family vacation in Florida, was walking his dog around midnight near the condo tower when he felt the ground shake and then the building collapsed.
“At first I thought it was a thunderstorm but then I felt a shake and I knew thunder doesn’t make the ground shake,” Balboa said. “I knew it wasn’t normal so I decided to figure out what was going on.”
Balboa said it was “eerily quiet” as he and another person approached piles of concrete and metal. Police and first responders had not yet arrived when Balboa heard a scream and spotted little fingers pop out through the broken concrete.
He heard a boy’s voice: “Can somebody see me?”
Climbing over the rubble in his flip-flops, using his phone for light, Balboa reached Jonah Handler, 15.
“He was just saying, ‘Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.’ I told him: ‘We’re not gonna go anywhere. We’re staying,'” Balboa said.
Using his phone, Balboa signaled to rescuers, who pulled Handler to safety. Handler’s mother, Stacie Fang, died in the collapse. Having recently lost his own mother, Balboa said he identified with Handler.
“I know what that loss feels like, but especially in this situation, it’s just so much worse than anyone can possibly imagine,” Balboa said.
Fang, 54, was the first of the dead to be publicly identified. She was pulled from the rubble and died shortly after being taken to a nearby hospital, according to authorities
Alejandro Rodriguez took his seat on an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., to Miami on June 24 without watching the video of the Champlain tower collapsing into dust and rubble.
His mother, Elena Blasser, 64, and grandmother Elena Chavez, 88, were in Unit 1211 of that building and were unaccounted for.
Rodriguez had woken up early and noticed he had a missed call from his sister-in-law after 6 a.m. His abuela must have passed away in her sleep, he thought.
The reality was much worse.
“Your mom’s building fell,” the voice said on the other side of the phone. He mustered enough strength to pull up images on his phone. The headline on the article read “partial collapse.”
Rodriguez held on to those words as he booked his flight, packed his bag and had his girlfriend drive him to the airport. Tears rolled down his cheeks incessantly, but he avoided looking at any of the TVs at Reagan National Airport.
As he sat in the plane awaiting takeoff, his phone buzzed with a new link. He clicked on it and saw the building crumble for the first time.
“That’s when I knew that they were gone,” Rodriguez said. “That was the tower. I had just talked to both of them the night before.”
As the plane soared toward the sky, he sobbed. The images replayed in his head, and the tears streamed out. He stood up to get coffee, and a flight attendant asked if was OK. He told her his mother and grandmother were in the collapsed Surfside condo. She asked if she could hug him.
The woman wrapped her arms around Rodriguez, and he broke down in her embrace, repeating her name to himself over and over again. He didn’t want to forget her name.
Rodriguez returned to his seat.
After taxing to the gate in Miami, the flight attendant scurried to find Rodriguez. She handed him a box of tissues.
“For the car ride home,” she said.
Searching for survivors, caring for the dead
As search teams pulled bodies from the hill of rubble, religious leaders stepped in to offer comfort and guidance.
In the second-floor ballroom of the nearby Grand Beach Hotel, Julie Jacobs, the rabbi of Beth David Congregation in Miami, spent the week shuttling from one grieving family to the next as they waited to hear whether their loved ones had been found.
A petite woman with kinky salt-and-pepper hair, Jacobs spent hours staring at the rows of conference-room chairs assembled in the brightly lit room. For many of the families there, the stylish oceanfront hotel once evoked joyful memories, of weddings or bar and bat mitzvahs. The past week, it became a place of despair.
An official announced Tuesday that two more bodies had been found. A chorus of wails echoed through the ballroom.
“It feels like you are choking from the inside,” Jacobs said. “Like when you squeeze a washcloth, that’s what it feels like.”
The possibility of survival from structural collapses evaporates with each passing day, from an 81% chance on the first day of search-and-rescue efforts to 7% by day five, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“You can’t deny the current situation is that it’s been more than six days from the collapse,” said Elad Edri, deputy commander of the Israeli Defense Forces, which deployed search-and-rescue teams. “The chances to find [survivors] alive are low.”
Finding the dead poses unique challenges, especially among the building’s Jewish residents who observe strict burial rites. Throughout the week, volunteers from Chesed Shel Emes, a nonprofit group that assists law enforcement in collecting the remains of Jewish people to prepare for burial, hovered alongside nearby search-and-rescue teams.
When a body is found, the teams notify the Miami-Dade Police homicide division, which documents the scene and exact location of the body. The homicide division hands off to the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office, then alerts Chesed Shel Emes, which takes over the remains, said Rabbi Mayer Berger, the group’s director.
“We’re going to do this for the duration of the operation,” he said.
Officials being honest about survivability is a key step in building trust with family members, said Jake Gillanders, executive director of Empact Northwest, the nation’s only nonprofit deployable urban search-and-rescue team. Speaking generally and not specifically about Miami, Gillanders said the standard practice is to have regular, private meetings with family members.
“It’s never an easy conversation,” said Gillanders, whose team has deployed to hurricanes, landslides and earthquakes globally. “A lot of what we have to do is just be honest with people, so they don’t get that false sense of hope. People really need to see that you’re putting in every effort possible because that’s a big part of them being able to accept at the end that you did everything you could.”
Gillanders said first responders and incident managers need to be prepared for family members to experience a wide range of emotions, sometimes simultaneously.
“They are in this terrifying limbo phase, and you have to be compassionate and sensitive to that,” he said. “Some people are having depression. Some have acceptance from the very start. Some respond with anger. You have to be prepared for any of those responses, and you have to be prepared to manage any of those responses.”
Survivors, many left homeless, also need support.
“The lives lost here will not be forgotten,” said Erik D’Moura, a resident of Champlain Towers South who decided late Wednesday to spend the night at his girlfriend’s house a few blocks away, possibly saving his life. “But on the other hand, the survivors cannot be forgotten either because they are going to need help.”
He added, “This thing won’t be easy.”
‘No one will remember’
The Red Cross set Monteagudo up at a hotel. Volunteers fed her three meals a day and gave her money to buy clothes and shoes.
She said she feels lucky to be alive, but depression sinks in when she thinks of the things she left behind in Unit 611: her wedding albums, photos of her parents in her native Cuba, photos of her children when they were young, all her clothes and other belongings.
Monteagudo said she fears that when the recovery finally ends and the TV cameras drift away, the world will forget about her and the others who made it out alive – but will have to restart their lives.
“The federal government will forget, the county will forget, the town of Surfside will forget,” she said. “Soon, when the morbidity of seeing human remains extracted from there ends, no one will remember those of us left on the street.”
Contributing: Jesse Mendoza, Sudiksha Kochi and Katherine Lewin, USA TODAY Network
But while the settlement was celebrated by some, other lawyers involved in the lawsuit said the deal would fall far short of what abuse survivors deserve. Tim Kosnoff, a lawyer who had partnered with Rothweiler’s firm in the suit, said to NPR that the agreement, which is not yet finalized, was a “rotten, chump deal” and a “failure.”
Trump Organization Executive Vice President Donald Trump Jr. blasted the Manhattan DA’s office Thursday night for bringing tax fraud and other charges against the company’s longtime chief financial officer, calling the case “political persecution of a political enemy.”
“This is what Vladimir Putin does,” the eldest son of former President Donald Trump told “Fox News Primetime,” later adding that “after … 3 million documents, countless witnesses and hours of grand jury testimony, outside forensic auditors, this is what they come up with: they’re going to charge a guy who’s 75 years old on crimes of avoiding paying taxes on a fringe benefit.”
Allen Weisselberg pleaded not guilty in Manhattan Supreme Court to charges of tax fraud, conspiracy, grand larceny and falsifying business records. Prosecutors say Weisselberg and the company concocted a 15-year scheme to compensate the CFO and other Trump Organization executives “off the books.”
Donald Trump Jr. called the case “political persecution of a political enemy.”Alex Wong/Getty Images
In Weisselberg’s case, prosecutors say, he received “indirect compensation” of more than $1.7 million, as well as free rent at a Manhattan apartment, luxury cars and private school tuition for his family members — without paying taxes on any of it.
“The taxable portion of that [$1.7 million] to New York State is 8 percent,” Trump Jr. said. “That’s $136,000 over 16 years. That’s 10 grand [actually $8,500] a year. Half of that, because my father’s a good guy, he paid for this guy’s grandchildren’s education. Our tax experts say that’s not even taxable. You can pay for someone’s education that way. So you cut it down, it comes out to … closer to five grand a year if you take out the education. And that’s what they’ve got.”
The charges against Weisselberg are the first brought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who has been investigating Trump’s business empire for two years along with New York Attorney General Letitia James.
New York AG Letitia James and Manhattan DA Cyrus R. Vance Jr. leave after the hearing for the criminal case against the Trump Organization and its CFO Allen Weisselberg on July 1, 2021.KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images
In a statement Thursday, James vowed that her office’s investigation would go on, “and we will follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead
“This is a farce. It’s a disgrace that they spent millions of dollars and years, instead of prosecuting actual murderous thugs on the streets of New York, they go after their political enemies,” raged Trump Jr., adding, “this is banana republic stuff, and if our press was even a little bit intellectually honest, they’d be calling it that … this is nonsense and it has to be called out as such.”
The former president’s son also shrugged off the possibility that Weisselberg would lift the lid on supposed wrongdoings by Trump, telling host Jesse Watters that “there has to be something to flip on.”
Allen Weisselberg departs Manhattan criminal court on July 1, 2021.AP Photo/John Minchillo
“It’s a disgrace. They drop it on a Thursday night, going into 4th of July weekend, because they know it’s a disgrace,” Trump Jr. concluded. “They know that the people that they’re playing to — the rich, liberal New Yorkers — they’re in the car, probably their corporate car, going out to their homes in the Hamptons right now, so they don’t see it and realize how much of an embarrassment it is. It’s a disgrace, and it needs to be called out.”
(CNN)On Thursday, New York prosecutors charged the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, with running a 15-year alleged tax scheme designed “to compensate Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives in a manner that was ‘off the books.”
The president said he doesn’t have any “firm proof” on what caused the collapse that left 18 dead and 145 still missing, but that there was all kinds of “rational speculation,” including “whether or not rising sea levels had impact.”
Biden spent three hours with the families of the victims, after touring the scene of the 12-story collapse, and said he was surprised how many of them talked about the impact of global warming. “I didn’t raise it. But many of the survivors and many families talked about the impact of global warming,” the president said.
“They didn’t know exactly but they talked about sea levels rising, a combination of that and concern about incoming tropical storms.”
Biden said the victims’ loved ones are “going through hell” right now. “It’s hard enough to lose somebody but the hard part, the really hard part, is to just not know whether they’re surviving or not,” he added in a nod to the so many who are missing. He said the families were “very realistic” about the slimming chances of survival with each passing day.
“They had basic, heart-wrenching questions, ‘Will I be able to recover the body? How can I have closure without getting to bury them?” Biden said of the families he spoke with. He said speaking with the victims called to mind his own experience with personal tragedy, having lost his daughter and wife in a car crash and his son Beau to cancer.
Search and rescue efforts were paused in the middle of the night due to concerns about building stability after a large column hanging from a structure had shifted.
An engineering firm in 2018 had identified key structural deficiencies requiring major costly repairs in 2018, but a former municipal official assured the condo’s board members that the building was in “very good shape.”
Biden also thanked Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as well as all first responders on the scene. There’s been “no disagreement, no bickering everybody’s on the same page. That’s what America is all about.” The president met with the GOP governor during his trip to Florida and other local officials.
He told Florida officials the federal government stood ready to assist however it was needed. “This is your show – we just want to make sure whatever you need,” he said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said it will conduct a “full technical investigation” into what caused the Champlain Towers South condo building collapse.
President Biden struck an odd tone near the site of the Florida building collapse Thursday as he talked about finding a “good” side to the disaster that left at least 18 dead and nearly 150 missing.
“You know what’s good about this?” Biden said at a briefing with local leaders. “It lets the nation know we can cooperate and when it’s really important.”
Biden added, “I just got back from 12 days in Europe. You wonder whether we can do this. And you’re doing it. I mean, just the simple act of everybody doing whatever needs to be done.”
Eighteen bodies have been recovered from the rubble and 145 people remain missing and are feared dead after the collapse of the beachfront building in Surfside, north of Miami.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, sitting to Biden’s right at a table in Surfside, thanked the president for federal support in the eight-day rescue operation, which was paused Thursday due to safety concerns.
“This is your show. We just want to make sure [you have] whatever you need,” Biden told DeSantis.
President Joe Biden said the tragedy “lets the nation know we can cooperate and when it’s really important.”Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
DeSantis applauded the federal response, saying, “You guys have not only been supportive at the federal level, but we’ve had no bureaucracy. When we’re dealing with FEMA, we’re literally getting requests routed from local to state to federal in no time and the approval is happening.”
The Republican governor added, “What we just need now is we need a little bit of luck and a little bit of prayers, and we would like to be able to see some miracles happen.”
Biden is expected to meet privately with the family members of victims Thursday afternoon before returning to the White House.
During a brief pep talk to local police and other emergency response workers around noon, Biden said, “I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” before veering off topic.
Gov. Ron DeSantis thanked President Joe Biden for federal support in the rescue operation.Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS
“As you all know, it’s not only what you’re dealing with now, but your brothers and sisters across this country are having more pressure put on them because of the drought, because when you have 121 degrees heats up in Vancouver you really got a problem,” Biden said.
“I was on the Zoom call yesterday with all the Western governors and you know what they’re asking for? They need more firefighters… because, you know, last year the fire season didn’t start this early. And enough places burned down, enough territory burned to the ground — more than, bigger than the size of Rhode Island. And already it’s started early.”
Biden also told the emergency personnel about how his first wife and daughter were killed in a 1972 car accident, with the “jaws of life” being used to free his two young sons.
President Joe Biden is expected to privately meet with the family members of victims.Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One that Biden’s goal for the trip is to “offer up comfort and show unity” in response to the disaster.
“The White House and FEMA have been in close contact with the governor’s team to coordinate federal assistance throughout the entire process,” Jean-Pierre said.
DeSantis is widely regarded as a leading potential 2024 presidential candidate. Former President Donald Trump also said that if he chooses to run again, he would consider DeSantis as a running mate.
The Arizona case was filed by the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that both Arizona restrictions violated Section 2 because they disproportionately disadvantaged minority voters.
In 2016, Black, Latino and Native American voters were about twice as likely to cast ballots in the wrong precinct as were white voters, Judge William A. Fletcher wrote for the majority in the 7-to-4 decision. Among the reasons for this, he said, were “frequent changes in polling locations; confusing placement of polling locations; and high rates of residential mobility.”
Similarly, he wrote, the ban on ballot collectors had an outsize effect on minority voters, who use ballot collection services far more than white voters because they are more likely to be poor, older, homebound or disabled; to lack reliable transportation, child care and mail service; and to need help understanding voting rules.
Judge Fletcher added that “there is no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona.”
In dissent, four judges wrote that the state’s restrictions were commonplace, supported by common sense and applied neutrally to all voters.
Lawmakers were entitled to try to prevent potential fraud, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain wrote. “Given its interest in addressing its valid concerns of voter fraud,” he wrote, “Arizona was free to enact prophylactic measures even though no evidence of actual voter fraud was before the legislature.”
Lawyers for Mr. Weisselberg, who is 73 years old, and the Trump Organization could not immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Trump has long attacked Mr. Vance’s investigation as a partisan “witch hunt.” Earlier this week, he called the fringe benefits that his company provided to employees “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.”
Now that he faces charges, Mr. Weisselberg still could cooperate with the prosecutors. If he ultimately pleads guilty and strikes a deal, he could do considerable damage to Mr. Trump, who for decades has depended on his unflinching loyalty, once declaring with “100 percent” certainty that Mr. Weisselberg had not betrayed him.
The two started working together closely in the late 1970s, with Mr. Weisselberg putting in time on nights and weekends to handle projects for Mr. Trump, the ambitious son of his boss, Fred Trump. Mr. Weisselberg said in a 2015 deposition that he had been helping with Mr. Trump’s tax returns since at least the 1990s, when Mr. Trump made him the organization’s chief financial officer.
Mr. Weisselberg has remained steadfastly loyal to the company even as his own name surfaced during congressional and federal investigations into Mr. Trump. While Mr. Weisselberg was never a target of those investigations, he has long been a central focus of the district attorney’s inquiry, which began in August 2018.
As the prosecutors have zeroed in on the benefits he and his family received from Mr. Trump, they have examined tens of thousands of dollars in private school tuition for one of Mr. Weisselberg’s grandchildren, a rent-free apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and leased Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Mr. Weisselberg’s wife also received her own leased Mercedes.
Mr. Weisselberg was not the only senior company executive to receive similar perks. Until 2018, when the company reined in the benefits, it provided a number of employees with Mercedes-Benzes.
Those types of benefits are generally taxable, though there are exceptions, and the tax rules can be murky.
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday pledged a “complete reunification” with Taiwan — drawing a strong rebuke from the democratic, self-ruled island, which criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s “dictatorship.”
Taiwan and mainland China are separated by the Taiwan Strait, which is only about 100 miles wide (160 km) at its narrowest point. The ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has never controlled Taiwan, but it claims the island is a runaway province that must one day be reunited with the mainland — by force if necessary.
In a speech to mark the CCP’s 100th year, Xi called “reunification” with Taiwan an “unswerving historical mission” of the party and a “common aspiration” of the Chinese people. The audience erupted in applause in response.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council lashed out at the CCP in a statement after Xi’s speech. It said the party had achieved economic development in China, but added that it has clamped down on democracy, violated human rights and grown more dictatorial domestically.
“Democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law are core principles of Taiwanese society — a major institutional difference from the other side of the strait,” said the Mandarin-language statement, which was translated by CNBC.
The council said the Taiwanese government remains determined to defend the island’s sovereignty and democracy. It added that the Taiwanese people have long rejected the “one China principle” and urged Beijing to abandon military intimidation directed at the island.
The “one China principle” refers to the concept that there’s only one central Chinese government — the one under the Communist Party in Beijing.
Taiwan has also become a contentious issue between the United States and China. The U.S. has in recent years moved closer to Taiwan — angering Beijing, which considers the island to have no rights to conduct its own diplomacy.
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