NEW YORK. A three-story apartment building in Brooklyn collapsed into the open construction pit beside it on Wednesday afternoon, killing two people and injuring 17 others, including seven children, as firefighters searched the rubble into the night for anyone still trapped.
The building, at 1321 Flatbush Avenue in the Flatbush neighborhood, fell shortly after 4 p.m. into the adjoining excavation site at 2625 Bedford Avenue, where construction crews had been digging earlier in the day. The first 911 call came in at 4:01 p.m., and the Fire Department said units arrived in under a minute. More than 250 first responders worked at the scene.
Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said the department treated 19 patients in all, counting the two people who died. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. Four of the injured were in critical condition, officials said, 12 were in stable condition, and a firefighter suffered minor injuries. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the injured were taken to local hospitals with a combination of critical and non-life-threatening injuries.
The collapsed building dated from 1930 and held four apartments above a ground-floor store selling medical uniforms. How many people were inside when it fell was not immediately known, and officials said late on Wednesday that they did not know whether everyone was accounted for. Chief of Department John Esposito said the search could continue for several days, through wreckage that the mayor described as precarious, with dangerous voids beneath the surface.
“This was a devastating collapse and we know that it affects the lives of many New Yorkers who live here on Flatbush,” Mamdani said at an evening news conference at the scene. “As we rebuild, the City of New York will stand alongside those impacted at every step of the way.” One of the people killed was identified by his brother as Jose Luis Caguana, a 26-year-old immigrant from Ecuador who had been in the United States for about six years, according to local reports. Officials had not formally released the names of the dead on Wednesday night.
What caused a 96-year-old building to fall is now the central question. Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said workers had been excavating the lot next door, and that a developer had submitted plans for a nine-story building on that site that had not yet been approved. City records show issues were logged in May at the Bedford Avenue project, according to local station NY1. The Department of Buildings and law enforcement agencies will lead the investigation into the cause, Mamdani said, and buildings officials were at the scene on Wednesday evening. No official cause has been given.
Flatbush Avenue was closed between Clarendon Road and Bedford Avenue while the rescue operation continued. Witnesses described the building crumbling into the pit and trapping both residents and workers under the rubble, and one survivor was brought out on a stretcher about two and a half hours after the collapse, according to the Associated Press. Casualty figures changed through the evening as more victims were found, and officials warned they could change again.
The collapse is the kind of failure New York regulators say excavation work next to older buildings is supposed to prevent. Adjacent digging can undermine a neighboring foundation if it is not properly shored and monitored, which is why the city requires engineering plans and inspections for excavation near existing structures. Whether any of those safeguards failed on Flatbush Avenue is what investigators will now work to establish, while rescue crews finish the slower task of clearing the rubble by hand.
Source: The Business Standard (Reuters and city officials); Associated Press reports summarized by Watch Previously
