Rescue crews have pulled 35 people from a collapsed condo tower in Miami and search efforts continue, a fire official said mid-morning on Thursday.

Among those found alive in the rubble from the 12-story beachside building that fell around 1.30am was a young boy. The collapse of Champlain Towers South in the middle of the night as people were sleeping killed at least one person and injured at least 10 people.

There may be more dead in addition to a woman, and many more could be trapped underneath the debris. It was not immediately known how many people were missing.

‘The building has literally pancaked,’ Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said. ‘That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me that we are going to be as successful as we wanted to be in finding people alive.’

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At the time of its collapse, the building was ‘substantially full’, according to authorities, and 55 of the 136 apartment units were destroyed. Images showed a section of a wing of the building crumbled to the ground while the rest of the structure still stood.

What caused the collapsed has not yet been determined. The building was undergoing roof renovations, but Burkett said that was not likely what prompted the structure’s ‘catastrophic failure’.

‘It’s hard to imagine how this could have happened. Buildings just don’t fall down,’ Burkett said. ‘There’s no reason for this building to go down like that unless someone literally pulls the supports out from underneath.’ 

The condo was constructed in 1981 in the southeast section of the town of Surfside which has a mix of old and new apartment complexes, condos, houses and hotels. It had several two-bedroom units on the market listed from $600,000 to $700,000. The collapsed building is located a block away from where Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner recently moved to.

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