Here's Why Biden Has No Plans Of Visiting Florida Condo Collapse Site Soon

President Joe Biden is unlikely to travel to the site of a deadly building collapse in South Florida that led to the death of 11 people, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

Psaki said that Biden is not visiting Surfside, Florida, to avoid drawing law enforcement officials away from the ongoing search-and-rescue operations. At least 150 people are still missing since the collapse last Thursday.

“In terms of a visit by the president, we always want to ensure that we’re not pulling from local resources. We don’t want to draw resources that are needed in the ongoing search and rescue operations,” Psaki was quoted as saying by Politico.

But the president does support conducting a full investigation into the collapse, the White House official said, adding that they will remain “in close contact” with federal agencies on the ground.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has deployed two search and rescue teams, along with building engineers to the site. Other agencies, such as the FBI, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Institutes of Standards and Practices have also deployed their own experts to determine the cause of the collapse.

On Monday, first responders pulled two more bodies from the rubble, raising the death toll to 11. Prior to that, four victims were pulled out of the rubble Sunday, leaving 150 more unaccounted for, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said in a news conference.

Some hints about the possible cause of the collapse have begun to emerge. In April, a letter written by the building’s condo association president and obtained by USA Today, discussed the deterioration of the building’s concrete, noting that it had “gotten significantly worse” since an inspection two and a half years earlier.

The inspection, conducted in the fall of 2018, pointed out a “major error” in the building’s design, as well as the crumbling of concrete columns in the garage area located beneath the building. However, a town building official later told board members that the building was in “very good shape” a month after the inspection.

In addition to the inspection and the April letter, photos taken by a contractor who visited the building two days before the devastating collapse showed standing water in the parking garage, cracking concrete and corroded rebar under the pool.

“I thought to myself, that’s not normal,” the contractor, who was hired to put together a bid for cosmetic restoration of the pool, told the Miami Herald. “I wonder if this was going on in other parts of the building and caused this collapse.”