Families Hold Onto Hope As Condo Collapse Toll Rises To 9

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the death toll from the building collapse has risen to nine as search and rescue efforts continue.

She said one victim had died in the hospital, while workers had pulled more bodies from the wreckage since yesterday.

Scores of rescue workers remained on the massive pile of rubble, working to find survivors among the more than 150 people who remain unaccounted for.

“We were able to recover four additional bodies in the rubble as well additional human remains. As of today, one victim passed away in the hospital, and we’ve recovered eight ... victims on site. So, I am confirming today that the death toll is at nine. We’ve identified four of the victims and notified the next of kin.”

Four days after Thursday’s collapse, more than 150 people remain unaccounted for in Surfside, and authorities and loved ones fear the toll will go much higher.

As rotating teams of rescuers continued to use heavy machinery and power tools to clear the rubble from the top and tunnel in from below, the Noriega family hoped that their 92-year-old matriarch Hilda Noriega had somehow survived.

When Mike Noriega heard that part of the condominium tower where his grandmother lived had collapsed, he rushed with his father to the scene. They arrived at a nightmarish 30-foot pile of pancaked concrete and mangled metal, the remains of her 12-story building.

But among the flying debris, they stumbled across mementos that bore witness to Hilda’s life on the sixth floor in Champlain Towers South: an old picture of her with her late husband and their infant son, and a birthday card that friends from her prayer group sent two weeks earlier with the acronym “ESM,” Spanish for “hand-delivered,” scrawled across the yellow envelope with a butterfly etching.

“There was a message in the mess of all this,” said Mike Noriega, who last spoke with his grandmother the day before the disaster. “It means not to give up hope. To have faith.”

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett on Sunday morning assured families that rescuers were working nonstop. “Nothing else on our mind, with the only objective of pulling their family members out of that rubble,” he told ABC’s “This Week.”

“We’re not going to stop doing that -- not today, not tomorrow, not the next day. We’re going to keep going until everybody’s out.”

The Noriega family described Hilda as a fiercely independent and vivacious retiree — in Mike’s words, “the youngest 92-year-old I know ... 92 going on 62.”

Hilda Noriega had called Champlain Towers South home for more than 20 years. But six years removed from her husband’s death, she was ready to leave. The condo was up for sale, and her plan was to move in with family.

She had loved living near the ocean and friends, but “when you lose a spouse, you want to be surrounded by family ... and she wanted to spend more time with her family and grandchildren,” said Sally Noriega, Hilda’s daughter-in-law.

Sally called Hilda a sweet, loving person who built a life with her husband and raised a family after coming to the U.S. from Cuba in 1960.

“She was just one of those people who from the first time she met a person she instantly loved that person, and that person instantly loved her,” Sally said.

Carlos Noriega, Hilda’s son and police chief of nearby North Bay Village, was one of the emergency responders clambering atop the pile.

The Noriegas don’t entirely know what to make of the treasured mementos found amid the chaos, but Sally said: “We are a family of faith. We’ll just leave it at that.”