NEW YORK — Eight people were dead and at least 18 injured after a three-story building in Brooklyn collapsed into an adjacent construction site Wednesday, New York City officials said.
Two of the dead were children, and two were construction workers, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters Thursday. The injured included four firefighters. Mamdani said most of the hospitalized were in stable condition, and one was considered critical.
The fire department ended its search for survivors just after 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. New York Fire Department Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said a downpour of rain Thursday that the department’s search would not stop until “we are 100 percent sure there are no more people trapped.”
The cause of the collapse is under investigation.
Department of Buildings officials are conducting safety checks at 100 locations across the city associated with five entities involved with the construction site, Mamdani said.
“A tragedy of this magnitude demands a comprehensive and thorough investigation that includes both the construction site and the building which collapsed,” he said, adding: “We will find out what happened, and we will share that information with New Yorkers.”
The remnants of people’s lives were visible Thursday in what remained of a next-door building, whose walls were partly sheared off. Pink sheets and a pile of clothes covered a bed, and clothing closets were visible nearby. Mamdani said immigrants from countries including Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago were among the dead.
More than 250 emergency responders, including fire, medical and police workers, responded to the scene on Flatbush Avenue after the alarm was raised just after 4 p.m. Wednesday.
Rescuers used pickaxes and power saws to make their way through the rubble, according to photos from the scene and local media reports. Fire and police dogs were also deployed.
Some construction workers on-site at the time of the collapse dug other people out of the rubble after barely surviving themselves, Mamdani said at Thursday’s news conference.
“People are alive today because of their heroism yesterday,” he said.
Video footage showed survivors being pulled from the wreckage. One woman’s husband told ABC7 that she was six months pregnant and that he was very happy she had been found alive.
“This has been an incredibly challenging and fast-moving situation with precarious wreckage to navigate and dangerous voids beneath the surface,” Mamdani said at a news conference Wednesday.
Authorities shut down city water mains early Thursday to allow emergency responders to continue working, affecting around 100 buildings.
Records filed in the months leading up to the tragedy warned of the potential for adverse impacts to other buildings in the area due to excavation and vibrations from construction. The collapsed building was built in 1930. Like many in the area, the building was aging, said Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a New York State assembly member with an office across the street from the collapse.
She told The Washington Post on Thursday that city leaders were examining the excavation plans and whether the crew was digging deeper than authorized by their construction permits.
The three-story apartment building is owned by Isolag Realty Corp with Olufemi Falade listed as its registered agent, according to city property records.
The collapsed building has been cited for 11 violations of the city’s housing and maintenance code this year, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. In April, the property received a citation for inadequate water supply to the building’s sprinkler system. The property was also instructed to repair a roof leak and exposed electrical wiring that same month.
In total, the property has 25 open violations that the city classifies as hazardous or immediately hazardous.
The same records show Falade owns multiple properties throughout Brooklyn which, like the property that collapsed, have unresolved violations of city building code going back several years. He was jailed for 12 days in 2006 over hazardous conditions and unpaid fines at his properties, the New York Post reported at the time.
Falade did not respond to multiple phone calls from The Washington Post.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said his office was “working closely” with the Department of Buildings and law enforcement “to determine whether any criminal conduct contributed to this tragedy.”
Construction was ongoing at a lot next to the north wall of the building that collapsed. The construction site had a plan approved for a three-story building, said Ahmed Tigani, the Department of Buildings commissioner. He said further plans for a nine-story building had been filed but not yet approved. Publicly filed zoning documents outline a plan for a mixed-use building, including a food store, apartments and businesses.
Robert Fischman owned the lot where construction was taking place, records show. He sent a required notice to a local advisory board in February notifying the community that construction would start in 30 days.
“All precautions will be taken to protect your property at 1321 Flatbush Avenue that is adjacent to our referenced property,” Fischman said in one of the letters.
The construction site was fined $10,000 for failing to abide by a stop-work order from the Department of Buildings in April. The fine was paid in October. Excavation work to construct the building’s cellar started on Sept. 10, according to records, and that work was ongoing on the day the building collapsed, James Williams, who works nearby, told The Post Thursday.
Williams, 60, said he heard loud bangs from the construction site the day of the collapse.
“They were hitting that structure tremendously,” he said. “Every five minutes after five minutes — bang. Like they were trying to break something down there to get through to something.”
Williams questioned whether enough was done to make sure the residents in the adjacent building were safe during the construction.
“What did y’all do to secure those people who lived over there?” he asked.
A stop-work order was issued for the construction site Wednesday, according to the Department of Buildings.
Victoria Bisset contributed to this report.
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