Mumbai Building Collapse Kills at Least 13 - Wall Street Journal

By
• SHREYA SHAH

Rescue operations continued in the Indian city of Mumbai on Friday where a five-story building collapsed earlier in the day, killing at least eight people and sending rescuers racing to reach dozens of people trapped in the rubble.

MUMBAI—At least 13 people died and dozens were injured after a five-story residential building collapsed in Mumbai Friday morning.

By evening, rescue workers had pulled 52 people from the rubble, including some dead, said Sitaram Kunte, head of the city government.

Building Collapse

Associated Press

Indian fire officials rescued a child from the debris.

Mumbai's mayor, Sunil Prabhu, told news channels that 22 families had been staying in the building, which an official at the city's fire department said collapsed at 6:10 a.m.

Mr. Kunte said he didn't know how many people remain trapped and that rescue operations were continuing.

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Mr. Prabhu said the building, in the dockyard area of south Mumbai, was dilapidated and undergoing repairs.

Building collapses are common in India, particularly during or soon after the heavy rains of the monsoon season. Collapses are often blamed on the use of substandard materials and poor workmanship, with buildings going up without adequate supervision or licenses.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Rescue workers search for survivors at the site of a five-story building that collapsed Friday in Mumbai.

In August, at least 11 people were killed when two apartment buildings collapsed in Vadodara, in the northwestern state of Gujarat. In July, 17 people died in a building collapse in Secunderabad in south India, a week after a building housing a garment factory in Bhiwandi, around 20 miles from Mumbai, collapsed, killing six people.

The deadliest case in India this year occurred in Thane, also near Mumbai, when 74 people, including 18 children, were killed after an illegally constructed residential building collapsed.

In April, more than 1,100 people died when a factory complex collapsed in neighboring Bangladesh. It was one of the world's worst industrial accidents.

—Ashutosh Joshi contributed to this article.

Write to Shreya Shah at Shreya.shah@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 28, 2013, on page A9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Mumbai Building Collapse Kills 13.