"We've now recovered four additional victims. The number of deceased is at 16. Twelve next-of-kin notifications have been completed, that is four families still waiting to hear," Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told a news conference.
Hopes are dwindling that the hundreds of rescuers combing the oceanfront site will find anyone alive as the rescue efforts continued for the seventh day to locate more than 140 people unaccounted for.
Nobody has been pulled alive from the mounds of pulverized concrete, splintered lumber and twisted metal since the early hours of the disaster.
Levine Cava said the personnel in what has become an enormous rescue operation were doing "everything humanly possible, and then some, to get through this tragedy, and we are doing it together."
Colonel Golan Vach, head of an Israeli military unit that specializes in search and rescue operations, told CNN his team had uncovered the bodies as they sifted through the debris, finding what he described as tunnels in the rubble.
In one case, this space was created between balconies of apartments that pancaked when part of the building collapsed, he said.
"Between them remained a big space of air," Vach said. "We crawled in those tunnels. We called people and unfortunately we didn't find anything."
He said hopes of finding survivors so long after the early morning collapse were "very, very minor. We must be realistic."
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