An apartment building in Brooklyn collapsed on Thursday, leaving two people dead and multiple people trapped beneath the rubble.
Firefighters were sifting through the wreckage late into the evening, searching for survivors.
Two people was pronounced dead on at the scene, while four people were taken to a hospital in critical condition, according to the New York City Fire Department. A further 13 people suffered minor injuries.
A child was pulled from the rubble and carried away on a stretcher, according to US media reports.
The three-storey building, at the busy intersection of Bedford and Flatbush Avenues in the Flatbush neighbourhood, partially collapsed around 4pm into an open construction pit next door, exposing the residential rooms inside.
Footage from the scene showed firefighters searching deep inside the mass of debris with torches and digging by hand. Rescue dogs were combing the site, searching for victims.
“Searches continue. Operation ongoing,” a fire department spokesman said. It is unclear how many more people are trapped.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said more than 250 firefighters were at the scene.
“This has been an incredibly challenging and fast-moving situation, with precarious wreckage to navigate and dangerous voids beneath the surface,” he said.
“This type of rescue is exactly what the FDNY trains for.”
Lillian Bonsignore, New York fire department’s commissioner, said the rescue teams were performing “dangerous and perilous” work.
“Every move is choreographed,” she said.
One firefighter sustained minor injuries, fire officials said.
Anderson Velez, a resident of the collapsed building, told the New York Post that he was at work when his wife called and said she and their two kids, ages 7 and 2, were trapped in the wreckage.
“She called me when the building collapsed while she was inside with rubble on top of her,” he said.
“She was screaming for someone to help get my son out and then the call cut off.”
Velez said he later learned that his family had been pulled from the rubble alive.
A witness told the New York Times that the building collapsed as she was dropping off her daughter at a nearby hair salon.
“Everything went down, and everybody was screaming,” Melissa Orna, 53, said.
“The whole building started shaking, and then it just fell.”
The cause of the collapse was under investigation, but Ahmed Tigani, New York City’s buildings commissioner, said that when the building fell, construction workers were excavating an empty lot next door for a new building.
The city’s Department of Buildings said its inspectors were on the scene “assisting with recovery operations and conducting structural stability inspections of nearby buildings”.
- Daily Telegraph UK
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