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Facing the possibility of a busy hurricane season, Florida officials have reportedly asked the federal government for additional rescue workers to assist at the site of the deadly condo building collapse.
Every Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force is currently deployed in Surfside, where the Champlain Towers South condo tower partially collapsed a week ago, the Miami Herald reported.
Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie and Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky have requested that FEMA send a search-and-rescue team to free up some crews to handle possible storms in the coming days, according to the paper.
“The thought process that both the chief and I thought about today was we have all eight Urban Search and Rescue teams engaged in this fight from Florida, so we talked about doing a relief,” Guthrie said. “So we have all the resources we need, but we’re going to bring in another team to, if you will, back-fill those resources.”
On Tuesday night, there were two disturbances tracked in the Atlantic by the National Hurricane Center — though it was too early to tell if they will progress into storms or where they will go.
One disturbance is a tropical wave several hundred miles east of the Lesser Antilles — and forecasters say it has a 10 percent chance of formation in the next 48 hours and a 20 percent chance in the next five days, the paper reported.
“Due to the recent five-day forecast with two storms, we decided that it would be best to go ahead and activate them,” Cominsky said.
He added that authorities have already requested to have three federal teams on standby, including one to be deployed to Surfside.
Guthrie said: “There’s no more needed resources in the numbers of people, but we want to rotate those out so that we can get some resources back in case in seven to 10 days or so we may be dealing with some type of tropical cycle.”
Intermittent bad weather has already caused temporary delays in the search-and-rescue efforts at the disaster site.
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