New Delhi: Eleven people, including three children, were killed after a four-storey building collapsed in north-east Delhi’s Shakti Vihar in the early hours of Saturday. The incident also left 11 persons injured.
A closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera installed at a nearby building captured the moment the building came down crashing, showing a thick cloud of dust filling the narrow ally.
Teams from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), Delhi Fire Services, police, along with locals, carried out the rescue operation for more than 12 hours at the site of the 20-year-old building in the Mustafabad area that collapsed around 3 am on Saturday.
Officials said the area being highly congested made the rescue efforts all the more challenging. According to police, there were 22 people inside the building at the time of the incident, most of them families.
The owner of the building, Tehseen (60), and six members of his family were among the 11 deceased, officials said. They have been identified as Tehseen’s son Nazeem (30), two daughters-in-law Shahina (28) and Chandni (23), and three grandchildren, Anas (6), Afreen (2) and Afan (2). The others who lost their lives in the tragic incident were Danish (23) and Naved (17), who were brothers, Reshma (38) and Ishaq (75), officials said.
“We have lost an entire generation of our family in just one moment,” said a grieving Bhulan, brother of Tehseen whose family lived on the first floor.
One of Tehseen’s sons – Aas Mohammad – was killed in the 2020 north-east Delhi riots.
There were four shops on the ground floor while the rest of the building was being used by tenants.
Anxious about the whereabouts of their loved ones, the inconsolable relatives of the victims kept looking in the debris even as the rescue operation lasted for hours.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences to those who lost their loved ones and announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh from the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF) for the next of kin of each deceased. The injured would be given Rs 50,000 each.
A police source said that construction work in “two-three shops” on the ground floor could have led to the collapse. The locals also said that construction work was going on at a new shop, which could have triggered the collapse. They also expressed concern about the fragile state of four to five buildings in the area.
Waste sewer water has been seeping into the walls of many buildings in the area for years, and over time, the moisture has weakened the structures, causing the walls to develop cracks, Salim Ali, a local resident, said.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) said in a statement that the building was around 20 years old and was not structurally stable. The civic body said that a survey of the area will be carried out, adding that several buildings in the locality, including the one that collapsed, were not structurally stable. Strict action will be taken against those found guilty of negligence, the MCD said.
“It felt like an earthquake. The floor shook beneath us and before we could understand anything, everything was covered in dust,” Ryan, who lives next to the building that collapsed, said.
“We thought maybe something hit our house but when we looked out, the entire building next to us had turned to rubble,” he said.
