A Miami building collapse survivor describes how the condo came down in three steps, giving him and his family time to escape the deadly disaster when their mother told them to run for their lives.
Gavriel Nier said the apartment complex in downtown Surfside near Miami, where more than 150 people are still missing since Friday, collapsed within minutes.
“If it wasn’t for my mother, it would have been much worse,” Gavriel Nier told Channel 13 News in an interview aired on Sunday.
“My mother is very special,” said Nir, who offered a special prayer at a synagogue to thank her for her escape. “Whenever she finds something suspicious, she is automatically alerted. She always understands that something is not right.”
Nier, the son of an Israeli father, described how his mother went to investigate what had happened when the first part of the building collapsed, apparently a parking area, and then raised an alert for him and his sister. All three survived the disaster.
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“We heard a lot of noise in the ceiling,” he said. “Minute by minute it got worse, it got more intense.”
Gabriel Neer in an interview broadcast by Channel 13 News, following the fatal collapse of a residential building in Surfside, Florida, on June 27, 2021. (Screen Capture: Channel 13)
A moment’s rumble shook the building and “we all got a little nervous.”
The family first thought it was an earthquake and left their house to get out of the building. Neer said, dust was flying from the parts of the building outside which had already collapsed.
Wasting no more time the family ran for their lives, only surviving for a few moments as the main part of the building collapsed, with clouds of dust throwing them across the street.
“We couldn’t breathe,” he said.
Building collapsed in Miami. 99 people unaccounted for absolutely scary CCTV. pic.twitter.com/Fq7YFIzyr7
— Aaron O’Brien (@aaron_o’brien9) 24 June 2021
Neer estimated that the whole process took no more than a few minutes. He said that the first sound of collapse was heard around 1.15 am on Thursday and the entire building collapsed by 1.19 am.
On Sunday, the death toll stood at just four people, taking a total of nine confirmed deaths. But even after four full days of search-and-rescue efforts, more than 150 additional people are still missing at surfside. No one has been pulled alive from the pile since Thursday, hours after the collapse.
Other families waited to know the fate of their loved ones who were inside and since then there has been no trace of them.
Kevin Spiegel told Channel 13 that his wife, Judy, is still missing.
Spiegel said that Judy “loves Israel and supports it in any shape or form” and that the family frequently visited the Jewish state.
Crew work in the rubble at Champlain Towers South Condo on Sunday, June 27, 2021 in Surfside, Fla. One hundred and forty nine people were unaccounted for two days after Thursday’s collapse. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The family, along with many others who await rescue operations, were determined not to give up hope.
According to reports, 34 Jews are missing in the rubble.
Odelia Weiss, who is active in a local synagogue, told the station that those missing included family and friends of a woman in the community who died before she died. The visitors had arrived to stay in an apartment in the building.
“They haven’t met yet,” she said.
Anger was growing among some families, who accuse rescue officials of not operating fast enough to find the missing.
Kahn apparently showed a clip from a meeting between concerned families and rescue officials in which a woman can be heard saying that “I was promised the Israelis would be let in, and here they are,” he said.
“It is impossible that no one comes out dead or alive in four days,” the woman said. “You gave us a promise and you’re not keeping it, and you can keep it.”
“My daughter is dying,” pleaded another woman.
Later on Sunday, a team of Israeli search and rescue IDF Reserve experts, flew to the US to help with the rescue operation, joined the American activists on the site.
An IDF search and rescue team arrives at the site of a fatal high-rise residential building collapse on June 27, 2021 in Surfside, Florida. (Giorgio Viera/AFP)
Members of the Rosenberg family urged officials in Florida to expedite efforts to find missing people.
Harold Rosenberg, whose daughter and son-in-law were missing at the time of the collapse, had a condo in the building. Rosenberg, his daughter Malka Weiss and son-in-law Benny are all missing.
“If it were your father, your sister, and your brother-in-law, would you send four firemen down a tunnel,” Shully Rosenberg, one of Harold Rosenberg’s sons, said in an interview with CBS.
Another son, Yehuda Rosenberg, said the family has rescue teams ready to enter the site if local officials do not do so themselves.
“We have begged the authorities that if you are not ready to go in, let us in. Please send someone inside,” he said.
Screen capture from video of Jake Samuelson, whose grandparents were trapped in the collapse of the Surfside building in Miami. (Channel 13 News)
For one family, the wait for the news has taken a frightening turn.
Jake Samuelson tells local outlet WBLG that his mother’s phone received more than a dozen phone calls From the phone of their grandparents, Arnie and Miriam Notaki, who are missing in the building.
Samuelson said his grandparents’ phone was standing next to their bed and since the fall, there have been 16 calls from that number to his mother’s phone.
But when they answer there is no sound on the line other than static.
The first call came at around 9.50 pm on Thursday, hours after the building collapsed.
“We were all sitting there in the living room, my whole family, Diane, my mom, and we were just shocked and we didn’t think anything about it because we answered, and it was constant,” he said.
But the next day, Friday, the calls keep coming.
“We’re trying to rationalize what’s happening here, we’re trying to get answers,” Samuelson said.
By Saturday the phone calls had stopped. When Local 10 News tried to call the number there was only one busy signal.
The 12-story oceanfront Champlain Towers South turned pancake as residents slept at midnight on Thursday. Surveillance video of the collapse shows it coming down in a matter of seconds.
Members of the local Jewish community were among those affected by the tragedy at Surfside near Miami Beach.
Paramedics and EMTs are working round the clock at the disaster site, along with Magen David Edom’s international unit and South Florida Hatzala.