Eight lives left!
A cat that lived on the ninth floor of the collapsed Florida condo was miraculously found alive — and returned to his family — two weeks after the building came crashing down, according to reports Friday.
The skinny black feline, Binx, was spotted wandering near the rubble of Champlain Towers South in Surfside Thursday night and taken to the rescue group Kitty Campus, according to local outlet WSVN.
“Pets are family, and this is a miracle,” Maria Gaspari, a friend of the feline’s family told the station, adding she was overcome with joy.
“I’m shaking right now,” she said. “In the middle of this sadness, we were hoping for good news either for any survivors or any pet.”
Binx belongs the Gonzalez family, formerly of unit 904, which has since been reunited with the cat, The Miami Herald reported.
Angela Gonzalez and her daughter Deven were among the first to be pulled from the rubble and were hospitalized. Deven’s older sister Tayler Gonzalez was not home during the collapse and dad Edgar Gonzalez is still missing, the paper reported.
It wasn’t clear how the feline managed to avert cat-astrophe — but his resilience may offer the family a glimmer of hope, Gaspari said.
“That’s actually Deven’s cat, so I’m sure she’s going to be over the moon knowing that they found her cat. I just can’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it when we received the confirmation. This is a miracle for the whole Surfside community,” she said.
Pet owners who failed to retrieve their animals from the collapsed tower before it was demolished were suffering unimaginable heartache, their lawyer said last week.
But the tear-jerking reunion may give other building residents a brief respite from stress and grief, Kitty Campus co-founder Gina Nicole Vlasek said in Facebook post.
“All we needed was a ray of hope in this tragedy … Today was one of the most amazing days,” Vlasek wrote. “One of the survivors came to see the cat and to determine if it was her families cat and IT WAS!”