The number of people who perished in a roof collapse at a nightclub in the Dominican Republic jumped to 218, officials said on Thursday, acknowledging that rescuers no longer had any hopes of finding anyone alive.
The roof at one of the Dominican Republic’s most popular discos, Jet Set, caved in early Tuesday during a concert.
Emergency management officials have repeatedly refused to indicate how many people were inside the club, which had a capacity of 700 to 1,000 people and was particularly popular on Monday nights.
Juan Manuel Méndez, the director of the emergency operations center, said officials were “triangulating” the number of tickets sold with the number of people at the morgue and in local hospitals.
He said 189 people were rescued in the disaster. He has not said how many tickets were sold, and representatives of the nightclub have declined to answer questions.
“This hurts so much,” Mr. Méndez said, noting that he would scale back the number of rescuers.
On Wednesday night, the authorities announced that the operation would officially shift from search and rescue to the recovery of bodies.
The more than 300 rescuers had “exhausted all reasonable possibilities” of finding anyone alive, the government said in a statement. The statement stressed that the excavation for bodies would continue.
“We are not abandoning anybody,” Mr. Méndez repeated.
Monday night at Jet Set was a decades-old tradition in Santo Domingo, popular with athletes, politicians and the business class — and that was reflected in the fatalities: A governor died, as did a family of prominent bankers and two former Major League Baseball players.
The body of the merengue singer who was performing, Rubby Pérez, was pulled out of the wreckage Wednesday morning.
Hogla Enecia Pérez contributed reporting.
