Part of a seven-story building in the Bronx, New York suddenly collapsed on Monday afternoon (Dec 11) as firefighters were seen tunnelling through a huge pile of debris in search of possible victims.
The FDNY said there have been no reports of injuries thus far. As per the official, there’s no confirmation on what caused the collapse.
Local reports said that the collapse happened around 3:30 pm (local time) on West Burnside Avenue and Phelan Place in Morris Heights.
There are businesses on the first floor of the building, and the rest of the building is residential. The building was evacuated, initial reports suggest.
Images and videos shared on social media showed people running for their lives as the building collapsed near them.
As quoted by CBS News, OEM Commissioner Zach Iscol said that FDNY members were on the scene 1 minute, and 36 seconds after they received the call.
FDNY Chief of Department John Hodgens said: “We immediately vacated and evacuated the building and started to concentrate on the debris pile in front of the building to search for any victims.”
“We’re tunnelling into that debris pile as safely as we can. Firefighters right now are in a dangerous position. We don’t know what caused the corner of this building to collapse, and we don’t know if any more of it is going to come down. But we’re searching for life. That’s the main objective at this time,” the official added.
As quoted, FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said, “All of our specialised training and resources that we have for an incident like this have gone to work. We have our drone up, surveying the area, seeing if we can find additional information about potential patients and areas of potential instability.”
“We have our K9 unit here, helping us search for potential victims. And we have all of our specially trained firefighters, tactical units, collapse units, and our EMTs and rescue medics who are trained specifically to treat someone in a collapse,” added Kavanagh as she provided details on what the firefighters were doing.
(With inputs from agencies)
