Surfside: Emergency workers who have spent 14 days pulling apart the rubble of a collapsed apartment tower near Miami said they were switching from rescue to recovery mode, signalling the effort to find survivors was over.

The news followed increasingly sombre reports from emergency officials, who indicated they had been preparing families for the worst outcome.

Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told families at a private briefing on Wednesday afternoon (Thursday AEST) that the emergency crews would remove the rescue dogs and sound devices, but otherwise would continue to search through the rubble for the bodies of their relatives.

“Our sole responsibility at this point is to bring closure,” he said, as relatives sobbed.

“Just based on the facts, there’s zero chance of survival,” Jadallah told relatives, according to a report in the New York Times.

For about two weeks after Champlain Towers South collapsed, officials stressed their focus on finding survivors — a hope that was rekindled after workers demolished the remainder of the building, allowing rescuers access to new areas of debris. The hope was that they might find “voids,” or open pockets in the rubble where someone could have survived.

Some of those voids did exist, mostly in the basement and the parking garage, but no survivors were found. Instead, they recovered more than a dozen additional victims. Because the building fell in the early hours of June 24, many were found dead in their beds. The death toll as of Wednesday was 46, with 94 people unaccounted for.

No one has been pulled out alive since the first hours after the 12-storey building fell.