Nearly 11 days after a large swath of a South Florida condominium suddenly collapsed, burying dozens and devastating the tightknit town of Surfside, demolition crews on Sunday detonated the remaining portion of the building – which officials said was unstable and potentially dangerous with Tropical Storm Elsa bearing down on the region.

What was left of Champlain Towers South had hampered authorities’ massive search-and-rescue effort for days, at one point leading them to pause for 15 hours. Demolition was initially thought to be weeks away – until the increasingly urgent forecasts that said Elsa could lash the area with strong winds and heavy rain.

Officials worried that the squalls would topple the remaining building onto the debris pile, further burying potential survivors and bodies. So at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, an emergency team activated strategically placed charges and brought the structure down in a cloud of dust, an eerily familiar sight for a community still grieving lost loved ones and upended lives.

With plans to have the building leveled, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, D, said she expects the recovery effort to resume as soon as it is safe to do so. Firefighters will then survey parts of the site that were previously inaccessible, she said.”Bringing down this building in a controlled manner is critical to expanding our scope of the search-and-rescue effort and allowing us to explore the area closest to the building,” Levine Cava said before the demolition at a Sunday news conference.

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