In the popular Mediterranean holiday city of Marseille, a building collapsed on Easter eve. Emergency services are searching for survivors under high pressure.
Update from April 9, 8:04 PM: After the collapse of an apartment building in the French Mediterranean port city of Marseille, eight people are currently missing. “Eight people were living in the building and it is these eight people that we have no news of at the moment,” Marseille prosecutor Dominique Laurens said Sunday evening. Presumably, the people buried are mostly elderly people and a couple of about 30. Children may not have been in the building.
Five people in nearby homes were injured in the collapse, which may have been caused by a gas explosion Sunday night. The fire brigade was on the scene shortly before 1 am. There was a fire under the rubble, which made rescue work difficult. “We must prepare for the fact that there will be fatalities in this terrible tragedy,” said Benoît Payen, the mayor of Marseille.
An eyewitness named Aziz, who declined to reveal his last name, spoke to France Press agency From an “explosion”, in which “everything” shuddered. “We saw people running, there was smoke everywhere, and the building collapsed into the street,” said the man, who said he ran a grocery store late at night down the street where the collapsed building was located.
Drama of the rescue in the Mediterranean: An explosion causes a residential complex to collapse, then a fire breaks out
First report from April 9: Marseille – An apartment building collapsed in the French city of Marseille during Easter eve. Emergency services are searching under pressure for people under the rubble. However, this is not easy, because a fire broke out under the rubble and made rescue work more difficult.
“We believe there are between four and 10 people under the rubble,” French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Sunday, assessing the situation in the Mediterranean port city. According to preliminary investigations, at least five people were injured in a nearby building. To be on the safe side, residents of about 30 surrounding apartment buildings have been evacuated.
Fire after building collapse in Marseille: “We don’t know if they are alive or dead”
It is unclear exactly how many people live under the ruins of the four-storey house on Tivoli Street. “It looks like four people were definitely inside the building,” Darmanin said. “We don’t know if they are alive or dead.” The collapse at night was probably caused by an explosion, and parts of nearby houses were also demolished. “We cannot yet know the cause of this very large explosion,” the interior minister said.
Fire after the collapse of a building in Marseille: facing a “very rare phenomenon”
The fire that started shortly after the collapse was still burning Sunday afternoon. “We are facing a very rare phenomenon – a fire that continues for several hours with extremely high temperatures,” said Mayor Benoît Payane. The use of water or foam should not prevent buried victims from surviving.
She added that rescue dogs would find it difficult to search for buried people. The smell of burning and high temperatures make work difficult. Bayan said that the four-legged friends have not found any human traces yet. But this does not mean anything. We cannot draw any conclusions from this at this time. (kas/dpa)
Just last year, two houses collapsed in Lille, France. After hours of searching, firefighters managed to pull a victim out of the rubble.
