A devastating roof collapse at a popular nightclub in the capital of the Dominican Republic has claimed at least 184 lives, authorities said late on Wednesday, as the search for survivors turned increasingly grim. The nightclub collapsed on Tuesday and for two days families have gathered outside the wreckage of the Jet Set club in Santo Domingo, anxious for information about their missing relatives and sharing photos with police. “We are not going to abandon nobody,” Juan Manuel Mendez, head of the country’s emergency operations center, said at a press conference. Emergency crews will continue to work until the last body will be found, but hopes of finding more survivors under the rubble were diminishing while no one had been pulled out alive in more than 24 hours, Mendez added. “In the coming hours there will be a transition from a search and rescue phase to the recovery of the bodies phase,” presidential spokesperson Homero Figueroa said in a statement. Families continued to hold out hope. Along with dozens of others, Alex de Leon was looking for his ex-wife, mother of their two children, and a close mutual friend at the area surrounding the nightclub.