However, earlier that day, Iowa alerted Florida that it no longer needed help.
“Mission cancellation copy,” Erik Sanchez, an emergency response official for the city of Miami, wrote in an email to about a dozen emergency management officials on the morning of June 5.
He emailthat NBC News obtained as part of its records request, was sent at 9:44 a.m. He acknowledged that Florida officials knew his help was no longer needed.
A second email sent at 1:04 p.m. June 5 by Miami-Dade County Rescue Lieutenant Jeff Rouse confirmed that Scott County, where Davenport is located, was “rescinding” his request.
“Immediately notify your staff not to deploy if you have not already done so,” he wrote.
However, several hours after both emails, DeSantis sent his tweet bragging about Florida’s role in dispatching personnel.
The Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management confirmed that the original request for assistance was to help find three people who went missing after the building collapsed and that the mission was canceled after those people were each found. of which he died.
“HSEMD learned on the morning of June 5 that the last of the three missing persons had been located during the early afternoon/early morning hours,” spokeswoman Lucinda Parker said Thursday afternoon.
Parker said by email that she was unsure of the exact time the phone call to cancel the mission was sent, but said it was done “early that morning.”
In his June 5 email, Sanchez, the Miami official, said two people from Florida had left the state before receiving word that the mission had been cancelled.
“I have 2 of my guys already flying,” he wrote. “We agree that they will arrive and communicate with the [point of contact] there to find out if they have immediate needs. At that time, if there is nothing else, we will coordinate to bring them back.”
He said a third officer “will not fly.”
DeSantis’ director of communications, Jeremy Redfern, said “you are wrong” when asked if DeSantis or his staff knew the mission had been canceled when DeSantis sent his tweet.
He did not provide further details and referred NBC News to the Division of Emergency Management.
The division’s communications director, Alecia Collins, said two officials from the state Department of Transportation were there and “gave insight” into how Florida responded to the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse that killed 98 people.
Parker, with the Iowa department of emergency management, said two Florida officials were there for a “brief time.”
“We reached out to Florida on the morning of June 5 to attempt to stop the deployment, however two individuals had already been deployed that morning,” he wrote.
The original cost estimate for the mission was $300,000, a figure that jumped to $472,431 on June 4.
Two days later, John Kohnke, an official in the office of Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, emailed emergency management officials that reimbursement cost estimates would have to be adjusted again, because the mission was “interrupted and/or cancelled.
Parker said Iowa does not yet have a request from Florida for cost reimbursement. Collins said Thursday afternoon that Florida would “request refunds.”
She said the state does not yet have a comprehensive cost estimate related to the early June application.
Wisconsin Emergency Management said it received its application from Iowa on June 4, for two people. Wisconsin deployed a structural engineer and a task force leader with engineering backgrounds, both of whom returned to Wisconsin on June 5.
Iowa has taken center stage in DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign. He trails Donald Trump in most public polls by significant margins, and his team is increasingly hopeful of winning Iowa, the first presidential nominating contest for DeSantis. the nation, to help right the ship.
DeSantis has made several stops in the state, including one in late May for his campaign launch. On Thursday night, his wife, Casey, introduced the grassroots group Mamas for DeSantis in Iowa along with Reynolds, the Republican governor.
