For more than 10 days, Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire Capt. Joseph Janosko and Lt. Joseph Garrison worked with everything from heavy machinery and shovels to garden trowels, spoons and their bare hands, holding out hope that they might find a survivor amidst the rubble of Champlain Towers.
They arrived six days after the June 24 condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. At six days in, there was still hope – hope that someone had survived in a void or crevice, hope that the death toll would not grow to match the number of missing, hope that there would be at least one survivor story to tell.
“We kept hoping that we’d find a void space with somebody in it,” Janosko said. He pointed to those who survived more than a week after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and a man who was pulled from his car alive nearly 90 hours after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco.