Emergency crews at the site of a collapsed South Florida condo aren’t just battling summer weather, smoldering fire and dangerous debris in their race to find 149 unaccounted-for victims. They’re fighting time, heat, water and other factors that will make it harder to identify the dead.
The longer the search takes, the more likely it is that human remains will have decomposed significantly, making DNA identification more challenging, experts say.
On Tuesday, searchers completed the sixth day of painstaking work since the collapse. Officials say they consider it a rescue mission, not a recovery. However, no one has been found alive since Thursday amid the piles of broken and pulverized concrete, twisted metal, and dangling debris.
Considering the conditions at the site