Rescue workers on Saturday finished a two-day search for survivors in the collapse of a residential building being constructed illegally in India's financial capital. At least 72 people, 17 of them children, were killed.
Another 70 people were injured when the eight-story building on forest land in the Mumbai suburb of Thane caved in Thursday evening, police said. Thirty-six of the injured were still in city hospitals and the rest were discharged after medical treatment, said Sandeep Malvi, a spokesman for the local municipality. Many had head wounds, fractures and spinal injuries. Hospital officials searched in vain for the parents of an injured 10-month-old girl rescued from the rubble after 12 hours.
Rescue workers using sledgehammers, chain saws and hydraulic jacks worked through the mound of steel and concrete Friday night in their search for survivors, police officer Dahi Phale said. Six bulldozers were brought to the scene. Twenty bodies were recovered overnight and the rescue work ended at noon Saturday after 42 hours, the municipal spokesman Mr. Malvi said. Police with dogs were still searching.
Prithviraj Chavan, the top elected official of Maharashtra state, said that a government probe had been ordered, and that a deputy municipal commissioner and a senior police officer had been suspended for dereliction of duty.
At the time of the collapse, between 100 and 150 people were in the building. Many were residents or construction workers who were living at the site as they worked on it, the spokesman Mr. Malvi said.
Local police commissioner K.P. Raghuvanshi said rescue workers saved 15 people from the wreckage, including a woman who was rescued 36 hours after the accident.
At least four floors of the building had been completed and were occupied. Workers had finished three more floors and were adding the eighth when it collapsed, police Inspector Digamber Jangale said.
It wasn't immediately clear what caused the structure to collapse, but police commissioner Mr. Raghuvanshi said it was weakly built. Police were searching for the builders to arrest them, he said.
Building collapses are common in India as builders cut corners by using substandard materials, and as multistory structures are built with inadequate supervision. The massive demand for housing around India's cities and pervasive corruption often result in builders adding unauthorized floors or putting up illegal buildings. In one of the worst recent collapses, 67 people were killed in November 2010 when an apartment building in a congested New Delhi neighborhood crumpled. That building was two floors higher than legally allowed.
The neighborhood where the building collapsed was part of a belt of more than 2,000 illegal structures that had sprung up in the area in recent years, said Mr. Malvi, the municipal spokesman.
"Notices have been served several times for such illegal construction," he said. "Sometimes notices are sent 10 times for the same building."
The building that collapsed was illegally constructed on forest land, and the city informed forestry officials twice about it, Mr. Malvi said.
Saturday 6 April 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323646604578406121029978946.html
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