Brooklyn Building Collapse: Rescue Ran Through the Night in Flatbush, With Two Dead and 19 Known Victims
A three-storey apartment building on Flatbush Avenue fell into the open construction pit beside it on Wednesday afternoon. By the evening press conference, officials counted two people dead, four in critical condition and twelve more stable among 19 known victims, seven of them children — and they still did not know whether anyone remained in the rubble.
NEW YORK — The search went on long into the night on Flatbush Avenue. A three-storey apartment building in Brooklyn's Flatbush section collapsed at about 4 p.m. on Wednesday, falling into the open construction site beside it where crews had been digging, and more than 250 first responders spent the evening digging through brick and timber by hand and with drones, looking for anyone still trapped, according to the BBC and Reuters.
The casualty picture, as officials gave it at an evening press conference, stood at two people dead and 19 known victims in all, seven of them children. Four patients were in hospital in a critical condition and twelve more were described as stable. Fire Department Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore, who put the known-victim count at 19, described the mission as extremely dangerous and said officials did not know how many people might still be inside the wreckage — the uncertainty that set the pace of the overnight work. Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed that at least two people were killed and that more than ten others were taken to local hospitals.
The rescues came early and hard. A fire crew that happened to be in the neighbourhood was on the scene within a minute of the collapse and helped pull the first victims from the debris, Reuters reported. Hours in, aerial video showed firefighters lifting a survivor, covered in dust, out of a hole dug into the debris pile and onto a stretcher; the rescue, at about 6:30 p.m., ended with the person alive and moving. WABC-TV reported that at least four survivors were pulled from the wreckage about two to two and a half hours after the collapse, including a pregnant woman. The building, which housed apartments above ground-level businesses, dated to 1930, according to city records reported by the BBC's US partner CBS News; photographs from the scene show an entire side of it sheared away.
What brought it down is not yet known. Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said the building fell while construction workers were digging the empty lot next door for a new building, and officials said the cause of the collapse is under investigation. For Dallas–Fort Worth readers, the story is the nation's lead overnight file: a residential building gone in seconds beside an active excavation, a rescue measured in hours, and a toll that, as of early Thursday, officials were still careful to call incomplete.
