Relatives cry as they wait near the site of the building collapse in Mumbai yesterday. The death toll from the collapse of the apartment block rose to 50 as rescuers frantically searched for others trapped beneath the rubble.
Agencies/Mumbai
The death toll from the collapse of a five-storey Mumbai apartment block jumped to 50 and was expected to rise as rescuers worked through the night searching for more victims trapped under rubble, officials said yesterday.
“We’ve got 50 bodies now and that number is likely to rise though we still hope for survivors,” Alok Avasthy, a senior official of the National Disaster Management Authority said as emergency crews struggled to find other people still missing as a result of the Friday cave-in.
“We are now looking for 19 others still missing,” Avasthy said from a control centre set up at the collapse site near the Dockyard Road in south Mumbai.
He said a male survivor in his 40s was the latest to be pulled from under the twisted iron bars and chunks of fallen concrete yesterday afternoon.
“One of his legs was stuck under a slab and he was brought out after it (the slab) was removed,” Avasthy said.
Fifteen of the dead were women, the senior rescue official said, while a number of those rescued were being treated in hospital.
Local officials said 22 families had been housed in the block owned by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in the city’s eastern suburbs.
“More (bodies) are buried in the rubble” Mumbai Deputy Commissioner of Police Tanaji Ghadge said.
Distraught relatives stood tearfully watching the rescue efforts, hoping family members would be pulled alive from the mass of concrete.
The residential block collapsed at dawn on Friday - marking the latest building disaster to hit the city and surrounding area.
Several diggers had been pressed into action to lift some of the larger slabs of concrete, allowing teams of rescuers using heavy equipment to take out bodies and search for those still alive.
The 28-flat building, of which seven were unoccupied, and a ground floor warehouse was declared “extremely dilapidated” a few years ago.
Last month, it was surveyed by a BMC team which recommended urgent repairs after shifting the families living there.
Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan who visited the crash site on Friday night vowed strict action against those responsible for the tragedy and announced an aid of Rs100,000 to the families of the victims.
Mumbai Mayor Sunil Prabhu is supervising the relief operations with top BMC and fire brigade officials, and announced a compensation of Rs200,000 to the families of each of the dead and free treatment of the injured in civic hospitals.
Acting on a complaint lodged by the civic body, the police have arrested a decorator, Ashok Kumar J Mehta for allegedly carrying out unauthorised modifications to the building.
Mehta was occupying the ground floor of the building and used it as a warehouse to store his decoration material. He has been charged with culpable homicide.
Police produced him before a magistrate and took his remand for three days.
Five other residential blocks have collapsed in or close to Mumbai in recent months, including one in April that killed 74 people.
Three buildings caved in during the month of June alone, killing 25 people between them. The monsoon season’s heavy rains are thought to have exacerbated structural problems.
The incidents have highlighted poor quality construction and violations of the building code, caused by massive demand for housing and endemic corruption.
The high cost of property in Mumbai and surrounding areas pushes many low-paid families, especially newly arrived migrants from other parts of India, into often illegal and badly built homes.
More than half of the city’s residents live in slums, while across India the urban housing shortage was estimated at nearly 19mn households in 2012.
