UPDATE: 51 people remain missing after a 12-story Florida condo building collapsed, killing at least 1 person
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1 person has died in a Florida condo building collapse early Thursday, authorities said.
51 people remain unaccounted for and 10 others were wounded, authorities said.
Video and photos show first responders pulling survivors from the rubble.
At least 1 person has died in the partial collapse of a Florida condo building in the early hours of Thursday morning and 51 people are unaccounted for after the disaster, authorities said.
At least half of Champlain Towers South, located on Collins Avenue in Surfside, Florida, crumbled just after 1 a.m. on Thursday.
At least 10 people were taken to the hospital, with 35 in total pulled from the rubble, authorities said. Dozens more remain missing.
Surfside Mayor Charles W. Burkett said in a press conference that the way the building collapsed is making it difficult for rescue teams to locate survivors.
"The problem is the building has literally pancaked," Burkett said. "It's heartbreaking because it doesn't mean, to me, that we're going to be successful, as successful as we want to be, to find people alive."
In an interview with The Today Show, he said the building damage was catastrophic.
"It looks like a bomb went off but we are pretty sure a bomb didn't go off," Burkett said.
The building is just one block from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's Miami home.
Videos and images posted on Twitter showed rubble from the caved-in building, and with fire department personnel responding.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at 9 a.m. ET that "a massive search and rescue is underway" to find survivors among the destruction. One of those rescued earlier in the morning was a boy around 10 years old, according to CBS Miami.
Video from the scene showed rescues from the collapsed condo's balconies, including NBC Miami footage showing a young person being pulled from the rubble:
Tweets from student reporter Eric Wasserman, who was at the scene, said that residents were trapped in the portion of the building that had not collapsed, and that more than one person was injured, including a firefighter.
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said that more than 80 rescue units were helping at the scene to the collapse. The Miami Beach Police Department was also there.
A real-estate profile of Champlain Towers South said that it was built in 1981. There are 136 units on the 12-story property, with two and three-bedroom units that range from $590,000 to $915,000.
The site of the building collapse is located just minutes from the posh Arte Surfside, where Kushner and Trump are said to be leasing a home.
Insider's Katie Warren wrote that the couple signed on to rent a "large, unfurnished unit" for at least one year, just after purchasing a $32 million plot of land on a private island known as Miami's "Billionaire Bunker."
The area's fire and police departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider on whether anyone was hurt or injured in the building collapse.
This is not the first time Collins Avenue in Miami Beach has seen a building collapse. In 2018, CNN reported that an empty 12-story building at 5775 Collins Avenue due for demolition collapsed at an unscheduled time, critically injuring one person.
Read the original article on Insider
