Sifting Silently Through Surfside’s Rubble
“Not being able to deliver for the families is what’s most painful,” Imbaro said, of the search for survivors of the collapse of Champlain Towers South.
Photographs by Gesi Schilling for The New Yorker
On Wednesday night, Sinead Imbaro, a forty-nine-year-old South Florida rescue worker, sat on a stoop in the town of Surfside looking into the distance. Her twelve-hour shift at the site where at least sixty-seven apartment units collapsed last week had just ended, and the day’s news was grim. Six more victims, including a pair of sisters aged four and ten, had been found dead. The death toll had risen to eighteen, with a hundred and forty-five people still unaccounted for. For nearly a week, Imbaro and her Belgian Malinois, Magnus, had been searching for any hints of life. The seven-year-old dog was trained to sniff for human breath, or human odors of any kind, but had found none so far. “Not being able to deliver for the families is what’s most painful,” Imbaro told me, as a light drizzle fell. “There’s no way to prepare for the emotion that you get from being here.”