The East Bay is sending a pair of firefighters to South Florida to help search and rescue efforts at the Champlain tower collapse in Surfside, where at least 10 people were dead and 151 were missing as of Monday morning.
Oakland Fire Department Battalion Chief Chris Landry and Contra Costa County Fire Protection District Assistant Fire Chief Jeff Peter were on their way to Florida on Monday.
Both are members of the Oakland department’s FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force and were requested by FEMA to join a specialized incident support team overseeing the search and rescue for victims.
The 12-story apartment tower partially collapsed Thursday. The cause is still being investigated, but reports say the structure integrity was questioned in a 2018 engineering report.
Luckily they don’t work for the State of California–which has now banned state funded travel to Florida and four other states (from ABC7 News): https://abc7ne.ws/3gZywJF
What a tragedy, and seemingly so avoidable considering the information coming out about building inspections on the property. Considering that some Structural Engineering graduate students at UC Berkeley didn’t speak English, I’m not absolutely shocked to see that this has happened, however. How do you learn in English if you don’t speak the language?
Additionally, the Graduate Assistant also told me there was no way to verify and authenticate the student’s transcripts from foreign universities, so they could have been doctored or faked for purposes of admission. The University makes money off of foreign students, so they don’t have a process of due diligence in place to vet these admissions. Or, they didn’t when I worked there. If I catch hell for saying so, you’ll know where it came from!
This is such a terrible tragedy. My cousin lives 7 miles north of this catastrophe and could see the red glow from all the first responder vehicles from her balcony that morning. So very sad.