A landline phone on one of the floors of the 13-story residential building that collapsed last Thursday in Surfside, near Miami, has made 16 calls since the day of the collapse, which left at least 16 dead and more than 150 missing.
Among those 150 people is an elderly couple, Arnie and Myriam Notkin, who lived in the apartment where the mysterious calls to their granddaughter’s number came from, but on the other end of the phone they only hear interference.
When the Notkin family tried to call back the landline, sometimes someone seemed to answer, but at other times they only heard static or busy noise.
Jake Samuelson, the couple’s grandson, said it was hard to believe his grandparents had survived the collapse seeing the scale of the destruction. Meanwhile, the nature of the calls remains a mystery.
Several telecommunications experts cited by The Washington Post They explained that the calls were caused by “an electrical equipment failure” or damage to the phone’s circuits. At the same time, they do not exclude that there is a living person buried under the rubble who tries to activate the phone but cannot speak.
“This is unusual enough to give me hope that someone alive and somehow protected in the rubble is trying to imply that he is there,” said Ted Rappaport, a professor of electrical engineering at New York University.
