A resident of the apartment building in Iowa which has partially collapsed Officials confirmed on Sunday that the bodies had been found at the end of last week. A spokesperson for the city of Davenport, where the building is located, identified the person as Branden Colvin in a statement to CBS News.
In a separate statement, the city said that two residents of the apartment complex remain missing, even as search and rescue crews continued to work through the night from Saturday to Sunday, noting that they were “focusing on the pile of materials and removing materials from the scene.”
It’s been a week since part of a six-story apartment building collapsed in Davenport on May 28. At least nine people And the displacement of countless residents and business owners. Colvin is the first confirmed crash-related death.
As searches began, Davenport officials said last week that five people were missing in the aftermath of the avalanche, with two likely in the wreckage and feared dead. Davenport Police Chief Jeff Bladel revised the number of missing residents to three on Thursday, saying at a news conference that two of the people originally thought missing have been contacted by the city and confirmed safe. One of them moved to Texas, the police chief said, and the other was found locally.
At the time, the authorities confirmed the names of the three people who have yet to be found. In addition to Colvin, 42, the missing persons have been identified as 51-year-old Ryan Hitchcock and 60-year-old Daniel Brin. Police last week asked the public for any information on the three men and said there was a “high probability” that each of them was in the house when part of the building fell.
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Recovery efforts have been complex. Constructed more than 100 years ago, structural engineer Larry Sandhas warned several days after the process began, of “imminent danger of collapse,” saying that search efforts should be done carefully.
The pile of wreckage left after the collapse was at that point supporting the rest of the structure, he said, making attempts to search the wreckage particularly difficult and perilous. Davenport Mayor Mike Mattson told reporters at the time that recoveries would continue despite the risks to responders, listing situations in which they had already completed rescues under very difficult circumstances. In one case, Mattson said, a doctor performed bruising surgery on a survivor while he was still inside the building because the person was found in an “incredibly dangerous” location.
The demolition order initially called for what was left of the apartment building to be demolished last Tuesday in hopes of protecting the surrounding area. But as people gathered in front of the building to protest the demolition, one resident was a 52-year-old Lisa Brooks, she pushed her head out of a fourth-floor window on Monday, about 24 hours after the collapse. Brooks’ family members said she was hiding under her couch when she heard the collapse occur and then passed out, apparently from a natural gas leak. With her rescue, it was noted that search crews had not found Brooks during multiple previous sweeps of the building.
On Tuesday morning, when the demolition was scheduled to begin, Sarah Ott, chief strategy officer for the department in Davenport, issued a statement saying that demolition of the rest of the apartment building would be a “multi-stage process that includes equipment being authorized and commissioned.” that day. Ott said the timing of the physical demolition was still being evaluated.