Stories of survival keep hope alive as rescuers race clock

For 17 days, Reshma Begum survived under heaps of rubble after an eight-storey garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh eight years ago. A few years earlier, Darlene Etienne held on for 15 days before rescuers in Haiti found her, thirsty and near death, in a house crumpled by an earthquake.

Stories of endurance and survival under the direst circumstances continue to kindle hopes that rescuers may find more people alive within the tons of debris that was once the 12-storey Champlain Towers South condo tower near Miami.

The search stretched into a seventh day on Wednesday, with more than 900 workers from 50 federal, state, and local agencies working on the effort. At least 16 people are confirmed dead and more than 140 still unaccounted for.

“No one is giving up hope here,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett proclaimed.

He cited the case of Begum, who subsisted on dried food and a scant supply of water while trapped in the ruins of the fallen factory. Rescuers had already abandoned hope of finding more survivors when they heard banging noises – the 19-year-old seamstress was clanging sticks against the fallen structure. Questions later arose as to whether the incident was a hoax, but the government insisted that there truly was a “miracle.”

No one has been pulled out alive from Champlain Towers South since shortly after the collapse. Finding survivors is especially critical in the early days of a disaster, experts say.

“After that, the survivability drops off pretty quickly – but it doesn’t go to zero,” said Dr Hernando Garzon, an emergency room physician in Sacramento, California, who has been deployed to disasters around the globe as part of humanitarian missions and search-and-rescue operations. “It’s too early to call it a body-recovery phase at this point.”