Rescuers rush to partial building collapse in Miami Beach

SectionsTVFeaturedMore from NBC Follow NBC News Nearly 100 people were unaccounted for Thursday afternoon after a high-rise condo building partially collapsed near Miami Beach, leaving at least one person dead and 10 injured, officials said.Authorities got a call about the collapse at the 12-story building in Surfside, a town in Florida's Miami-Dade County, around 1:30 a.m. ET, officials said during a morning news conference.Raide Jadallah, the assistant chief of operations for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, said that of the building's 136 units, 55 in the northeast corridor collapsed.Thirty-five people were pulled from the collapsed part of the building, and two people were pulled out of the rubble as of Thursday afternoon, Jadallah said.NBC Miami aired video of a boy being pulled out alive and being placed on a stretcher.There were 102 people accounted for from the building and 99 people unaccounted for, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters late Thursday afternoon.Rescuers with sonar equipment have been carefully navigating the collapse in hopes of finding more people.“It is a very slow and methodical process because every time we start breaching parts of the structure, we get debris that falls on us," said Jadallah, adding that a small fire sparked by the moving rubble had to be put out.Rescuers are keeping their ears open for any sounds, even if not voices.“We did receive sounds, not necessarily people talking, but sounds … of a possibility of a banging," Jadallah said late Thursday afternoon. "It is really, really dramatic to see the collapse of a major structure like that."He said the Red Cross was setting up displaced residents in hotels, adding that finding answers as to why the building collapsed would take time.Surfside Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer said search-and-rescue operations could "play out for days." A lightning storm complicated those efforts Thursday morning."I mean, could be weeks until we really know who is under the rubble, who survived, who didn't survive," Salzhauer said. "There's a lot of people unaccounted for, lot of families very concerned."Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said Thursday afternoon that "they've got resources like you can't believe here.""We've got the dogs.