BENA, Minn. (Video from WCCO, WARNER BROS PICTURES, CNN via CNN) —

Drawing attention like a fish flopping around out of the water, a massive muskie near Lake Winnibigoshish in Cass County, Minnesota, has been reeling in the attention of tourists for more than 65 years.

But put down your tackle box and tuck away your dreams of casting out to catch the 65-foot monster.

"You're not going to catch this with a regular muskie lure? You're going to use a moose or a black bear for bait,” Al Hemme joked as he talked to WCCO. “And, you're going to need a truck with a winch on it to reel it in."

The muskellunge in question is not actually a fish. It’s a large structure — which is also a piece of art.

And it’s big.

In its earlier days, it was used as a drive-up food stop — selling ice cream out of a drive-up window on the side of the fishy structure, according to Hemme, who — along with his wife, Amy —owns the muskie. The fish is located on the property of the Big Fish Supper Club.

It was built in 1957 by Wayne Kumpula, according to WCCO, which reports that burgers and fries, which were cooked in the muskie's tail, were also sold inside the fish when it was a food stand.

The Hemmes haven’t always owned the muskie or the namesake business. They purchased the property, which also houses a resort, in 2010.

Prior to the Hemmes becoming the owners, the fish structure was on the verge of physically collapsing, but It was refurbished thanks to the help of an anonymous donor and others, according to WCCO.

The muskie become somewhat of a pop culture icon over the years — having even taken a bite out of Hollywood. An image of the fish structure appeared as a postcard in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”

“There are so many people that watch that movie now, and they'll quickly take a picture of it and send it to our phones. 'Did you know?' 'Yes, we did know that,’” Amy Hemme said.

Decades after it was built, the giant work of art continues to draw tourists, movie buffs and selfie-takers to the supper club and resort.

"I love our place. I love our people. I love watching the kids grow through the years, and they become like family. It's very, very nice,” Amy Hemme said.

Those who may get a hankering to cast a line upon seeing the giant fish need not worry. According to the Big Fish Supper Club’s website, the giant fish is located “adjacent to one of Minnesota’s top walleye fishing lakes.”

CHICAGO — Last summer, Katie Lauffenburger quit her tech job to focus full-time on building houses. But instead of a wood frame, insulation and roofing, she starts with a hunk of clay.

She takes about 12 pounds of it, slicing it into thin sheets before wrapping it in canvas and pressing it multiple times through a slab roller.

“It's compressing the clay kind of evenly,” said Lauffenburger.

Lauffenburger is a ceramic artist, whose pottery work doesn’t involve traditional wheel throwing.

“I start by carving in details like windows and doors first,” she said.

She’s creating extremely detailed 10-inch replicas of existing homes.

“I did a bungalow for a lady, and it was her mother's childhood home. And it was a Christmas gift,” said Lauffenburger.

Together she and her husband, illustrator Phil Thompson, started their company Wonder City Studio a few years ago.

“Wonder City Studio is dedicated to capturing the places worth preserving,” said Thompson, who playfully carries the title of chief illustration officer at Wonder City Studio.

The couple—who shares their studio space with their 7-year-old Maltese poodle Yorkie mix, Vincent—has been focusing their work on the unique architecture of the Second City.

“We make arts that honor the city's history, its architecture, its legacy. And we do that through creating illustration on one side and ceramics on the other,” said Thompson.

“We love focusing on Chicago because it's what we know and what we love,” said Lauffenburger. “But we are always open to working on homes in other cities.”

Commissions for what they call "home and building portraits" have come in from all over the world, including Italy and Australia.

“For both Katie and me, we're all about the detail,” said Thompson.

Each piece is meticulously crafted.

“We really try to make sure that we lovingly capture those details,” said Thompson.

No detail is too small down to the bricks and trim. Each ceramic piece is painted with a clay glaze.

“I work from photographs often that the client has provided, and then, I rely a lot on Google street view because you can go up and down the street, see different angles of the home,” said Lauffenburger.

Thompson completes his ink and paper drawings in about four to six hours. But the three-dimensional ceramic homes can take six to eight weeks. Pricing starts at about $5,000 for the one-of-a-kind home sculptures. Right now, there’s a four-month waiting list.

“If you have a really complicated home or a building, for example, I'm working on a church right now. That price is going to have to be higher because it's just a lot more time and effort,” said Lauffenburger.

But it’s the final assembly that excites Lauffenburger the most.

“I really love the stage when I can assemble it and all these disparate pieces that I've been working on finally come together,” she said. “It almost feels like it comes to life right in front of my eyes.”

But becoming a part of someone’s life through the work, they say, is the most meaningful.

SURFSIDE, Fla. —

Exhausted crews neared the end of their search for victims of a Miami-area condominium tower collapse Wednesday as the death toll reached 97 with just a handful of people still unaccounted for.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference that the number of people considered missing has dwindled as authorities work to identify everyone connected to the building.

"It’s a scientific, methodical process to identify human remains. As we’ve said, this work is becoming more difficult with the passage of time,” Levine Cava said Tuesday, adding that it is "truly a fluid situation."

Twenty days after the disaster, Levine Cava said crews had removed 18 million pounds of rubble from the site. Search crews were taking great care to identify and preserve any personal property recovered, the mayor added.

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"They have given of their heart and soul," Levine Cava said of the crews that have worked around the clock for nearly three weeks. "We are totally walking among superheroes."

It will take much longer for experts to figure out what caused the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium to fall into a tangled heap of concrete and steel on June 24. The building was set for its four-decade recertification review when it collapsed.

Engineers and others investigating the cause of the collapse have been identifying key pieces of the 40-year-old building to determine what happened, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said.

“We're looking at how the building lines up with what the plans say,” he said.

The search for answers includes an engineer hired by the town of Surfside, a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, experts hired by lawyers representing families and others.

Part of the investigation will include what decisions were made by government building officials and the condominium board, which knew of serious structural problems with the tower as early as fall 2018. Some residents were reluctant to pay assessments in the tens of thousands of dollars for the repairs, leading to acrimonious board meetings.

There is also concern about the stability of Champlain Towers North, a nearly identical building next door built at the same time and by the same developer as its doomed sister structure. So far, no mandatory evacuation order has been given for that building.

"If there were a need to make any changes, they would," Levine Cava said of the north tower.

Discussions continue about what to do with the collapse site with families of the victims, Burkett said. Some residents who escaped the disaster want the tower rebuilt so they can move back in. Others want some kind of memorial site.

"We want the families to tell us what they want to see,” Burkett said. "I'm looking forward to having those discussions."

Florida officials are working on plans to tear down what’s left of a partially collapsed oceanfront condominium building after concerns about the structure’s instability prompted a 15-hour halt to the search for survivors.

After rescue efforts resumed Thursday evening, officials said they had started planning for the likely demolition of the remaining structure even as searchers continue to comb the rubble pile beneath it.

Scott Nacheman, a FEMA structures specialist, said engineers are looking at different methods for the demolition and how to proceed "to make the site safe for ongoing rescue operations."

Nacheman said that if the building comes down, there initially will be a slowdown in the rescue operation. But he said the demolition of the structure would create a safer working environment that could allow more personnel on the site and accelerate the pace of the work.

He said it would likely be weeks before officials schedule the demolition.

On Friday morning, about a dozen workers could be seen digging through the pile that now reached about 20 feet, more than 10 feet less than it was a week ago. Cranes were again lifting heavy objects from the pile and then workers would climb into the pile and begin removing smaller rubble by hand.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the decision about the demolition needs to be made "extremely carefully and methodically," considering the potential impact on the pile of debris and the effect on the search.

The rescue work was halted early Thursday after crews noticed widening cracks and up to a foot of movement in a large column.

Work resumed shortly before 5 p.m. after the site was evaluated by structural engineers, Cava said, describing firefighters as "really, really excited out there."

"We will continue to search feverishly, as we have done all along in the parts of the collapse that we currently have access to," she said.

The work stoppage had threatened to dim hopes for finding anyone alive in the debris a week after the tower came down. Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the halt was worrisome since "minutes and hours matter, lives are at stake."

The temporary halt to rescue operations unfolded on the same day that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the devastated community.

The collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium killed at least 18 people and left 145 missing. No one has been rescued since the first hours after the collapse.

"This is life and death," Biden said during a briefing. "We can do it, just the simple act of everyone doing what needs to be done, makes a difference."

"There’s gonna be a lot of pain and anxiety and suffering and even the need for psychological help in the days and months that follow," he said. "And so, we’re not going anywhere."

Peter Milián is a cousin of Marcus Guara, who died along with his wife, Anaely Rodriguez, and their two children, 10-year-old Lucia Guara and 4-year-old Emma Guara. Milián said he understood why the rescue work had to be temporarily halted.

"I mean, they’ve done everything they can. But we trust the people that are on the ground. And obviously, they’ve got to do what’s best for their people, right? Because it is a dangerous situation," he said.

During a private meeting with family members, Biden drew on his own experiences with grief to try to comfort them. Biden lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash and decades later lost an adult son to brain cancer.

"I just wish there was something I could do to ease the pain," he said in a video posted on Instagram by Jacqueline Patoka, a woman who was close to a couple and their daughter who are still missing.

Biden spoke of wanting to switch places with a lost or missing loved one. "The waiting, the waiting is unbearable," he said.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation. A 2018 engineering report found that the building's ground-floor pool deck was resting on a concrete slab that had "major structural damage" and needed extensive repairs. The report also found "abundant cracking" of concrete columns, beams and walls in the parking garage.

Just two months before the building came down, the president of its board wrote a letter to residents saying that structural problems identified in the 2018 inspection had "gotten significantly worse" and that major repairs would cost at least $15.5 million. With bids for the work still pending, the building suddenly collapsed last Thursday.

___

Associated Press writers Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale and Mark Kennedy in New York contributed to this report.

SURFSIDE, Fla. —

Rescuers searching for a fifth day for survivors of a Florida condo building collapse used bucket brigades and heavy machinery Monday as they worked atop a precarious mound of pulverized concrete, twisted steel and the remnants of dozens of households.

Authorities said their efforts were still a search-and-rescue operation, but no one has been found alive since hours after the collapse on Thursday. Eleven people have been confirmed killed, and more than 150 others are still missing in the community of Surfside, just outside Miami.

The pancake collapse of the building left layer upon layer of intertwined debris, frustrating efforts to reach anyone who may have survived in a pocket of space.

"Every time there's an action, there's a reaction," Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah said during a news conference. "It's not an issue of we could just attach a couple of cords to a concrete boulder and lift it and call it a day." Some of the concrete pieces are smaller, the size of basketballs or baseballs.

Underscoring the risks of the work, he noted that families who rode buses to visit the site on Sunday witnessed a rescuer tumble 25 feet down the pile. Workers and victims must both be considered, he said.

"It's going to take time," he said. "It's not going to happen overnight. It's a 12-story building."

Relatives continued their visits on Monday. From outside a neighboring building, more than two dozen family members watched teams of searchers excavate the building site. Some held onto each other for support. Others hugged and prayed. Some people took photos.

The intense effort includes firefighters, sniffer dogs and search experts using radar and sonar devices.

Early Monday, a crane lifted a large slab of concrete from the debris pile, enabling about 30 rescuers in hard hats to move in and carry smaller pieces of debris into red buckets, which are emptied into a larger bin for a crane to remove. The work has been complicated by intermittent rain showers, but the fires that hampered the initial search have been extinguished.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida's chief financial officer and state fire marshal, said it was the largest deployment of such resources in Florida history that was not due to a hurricane. He said the same number of people were on the ground in Surfside as during Hurricane Michael, a devastating Category 5 hurricane that hit 12 counties in 2018.

"They're working around the clock," Patronis said. "They're working 12 hours at a time, midnight to noon to midnight."

Andy Alvarez, a deputy incident commander with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that rescuers have been able to find some voids, or spaces, inside the wreckage, mostly in the basement and the parking garage.

"We have been able to tunnel through the building," Alvarez said. "This is a frantic search to seek that hope, that miracle, to see who we can bring out of this building alive."

Others who have seen the wreckage up close were daunted by the task ahead. Alfredo Lopez, who lived with his wife in a sixth-floor corner apartment and narrowly escaped, said he finds it hard to believe anyone is alive in the rubble.

"If you saw what I saw: nothingness. And then, you go over there and you see, like, all the rubble. How can somebody survive that?" Lopez told The Associated Press.

Authorities on Monday insisted they are not losing hope.

"We're going to continue and work ceaselessly to exhaust every possible option in our search," Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Monday.

Deciding to transition from search-and-rescue work to a recovery operation is agonizing, said Dr. Joseph A. Barbera, a professor at George Washington University. That decision is fraught with considerations, he said, that only those on the ground can make.

Barbera coauthored a study examining disasters where some people survived under rubble for prolonged periods of time. He has also advised teams on where to look for potential survivors and when to conclude "that the probability of continued survival is very, very small."

"It's an incredibly difficult decision, and I've never had to make that decision," Barbera said.

As time goes on, he said, teams will begin a process called "rapid delayering, where you take more risk by moving larger amounts of rubble, because you recognize you're running up against the time factor for survival."

How long a person can survive depends on a host of issues, including the availability of water, the severity of any injuries and the degree to which they are trapped, Barbera said.

"The human dimension is huge -- the uncertainty that you could be leaving someone alive behind by ending too early," Barbera said. "Families continue to have hope, as do rescuers, which is why you continue to see them pushing so hard within these difficult conditions."

The ultimate decision to move into the recovery phase, he said, will have to be made "with the involvement of the political authority because they're the ultimate authority over this."

The building collapsed just days before a deadline for condo owners to start making steep payments toward more than $9 million in repairs that had been recommended nearly three years earlier, in a report that warned of "major structural damage."

A federal team of scientists and engineers are conducting a preliminary investigation at the site and will determine whether to launch a full probe of what caused the building to come down. The National Institute of Standards and Technology also investigated disasters such as the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11, Hurricane Maria's devastation in Puerto Rico and a Rhode Island nightclub fire that killed 100 people. Previous investigations have taken years to complete.

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Associated Press writers Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami, Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Bobby Caina Calvan in Tallahassee, Florida; Julie Walker in New York and others from around the United States contributed to this report.

SURFSIDE, Fla. —

Video above: Alabama doctor among the missing in Miami condo collapse

The first victim of the Surfside building collapse was identified Friday.

At least four people are dead and as many as 159 people are unaccounted for following the collapse of a residential building in Surfside, a town near Miami. The incident happened at about 1:30 a.m. Thursday.

Thirty-five victims were pulled from the structure and two were pulled from the rubble Thursday, including a boy. Eleven patients are being treated for their injuries.

Fire rescue officials said they have to be careful when searching because the part of the building that is still standing is also shifting.

There are more than 80 rescue units on scene, according to fire rescue officials. Rescue dogs are also on the scene searching for people.

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Stacie Dawn Fang, 54

Stacie Dawn Fang died of blunt force trauma following the building collapse Thursday, according to her death certificate. She was pronounced dead at 3:38 a.m. Thursday at Aventura Hospital & Medical Center.

Fang was the mother of the teen pulled from the rubble Thursday, according to officials.

Her family released the following statement:

“There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Stacie. The members of the Fang and Handler family would like to express our deepest appreciation for the outpouring of sympathy, compassion and support we have received. The many heartfelt words of encouragement and love have served as a much needed source of strength during this devastating time. On behalf of Stacie’s son, Jonah, we ask you now to please respect our privacy to grieve and to try to help each other heal.”