I love this very methodical, Sherlock Holmes style of investigating. It clearly worked too. They found 84% of the 100 victims.
1) Despite the chaos, the debris of a collapsed building can be mapped to the structure as it was when standing.
2) All sorts of information can be used in figuring out where you are - the breed of a dog corpse, a scrap of paper with the name of a victim's rabbi...
3) Be skeptical of secondary sources (estimates of the number of victims...)
4) Bureaucrats will be obstructive just by doing their job as if nothing has happened (we can't tell you that...)
One thing that was not mentioned, but which I imagine was part of the calculus, is what people are likely to do at the first sign of trouble (in this case, noise and shaking) - head for the stairs, go to the window, wait for it to stop...
Of all the things the article covers, I'm most interested to know more about how they interview friends and family so quickly and efficiently, when things are still so raw and emotional. It does say that half the team is dedicated to that task, at least initially.
I can definitely see this as plausible.
The chilling and sad realization that it wasn't "They found 84 out of 100 victims"
ETA: 81, not 80.
>he knew precisely where each victim would be located.
>He personally found 20. His team, he said, recovered 81 by the time the last member departed Surfside on July 11.
Even the freaking byline reads:
>The Israeli Defense Forces’ National Rescue Unit recovered 81 of the 97 victims from the Champlain Towers South condo collapse site in Surfside.
2. The irony is that you are the one overthinking by going as far as to suggest weighing flesh. One can recover a body from the waist up and consider it 50%.