Posted on 06/29/21
| News Source: JNS
“I saw in the news that you were coming from Israel for us, and I was waiting for you,” says a tearful young woman in Surfside, Florida, to members of the Psychotrauma and Crisis Response Unit (PCRU) from United Hatzalah of Israel.
“People kept coming up to us and saying how happy they were that we arrived,” says Batya Jaffe, who was on the scene with her therapy dog, Lucy.
They were part of the six-person PCRU team that landed in Miami Sunday morning, along with a search-and-rescue team from the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command, following the collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South residential building last Thursday.
The death toll from the disaster stands at 11 as of this writing, while 150 people remain missing and 136 have been accounted for. Fires, flooding and falling debris have hampered the search in the rubble created by 55 of the building’s 130 apartments destroyed in the collapse.