Marseille: As many as eight people were feared dead on Tuesday after two apartment blocks collapsed in the southern French city of Marseille, where the bodies of a man and a woman have been pulled from the wreckage.
Rescuers worked throughout the night searching the rubble of the dilapidated buildings which collapsed suddenly on Monday morning in Noailles, a working-class district in the heart of the Mediterranean port city.
A third adjoining building partially collapsed on Monday night.
Prosecutors said the bodies of a man and woman were found separately on Tuesday under the 15-metre pile of rubble on Rue d’Aubagne, a narrow shopping street which now resembles the scene of an earthquake.
Rescuers formed a human chain to remove the debris, stone by stone.
A completely flattened car was dug out, an indication of the force with which the building came crashing down in what witnesses said was a matter of seconds.
Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said five to eight people were missing — five residents and three others who may have been visiting in one of the buildings.
“We still have hope, even if that hope is fading. There could still be air pockets,” said a senior rescue official.
The two other apartment blocks, which were in such a bad state that they had been condemned, were boarded up and in theory unoccupied.
Google Maps images taken in recent months showed the collapsed buildings had large visible cracks in their facades.
People had been living in nine of the 10 apartments at number 65, while a shop occupied the ground floor.
Marseille city authorities, who have evacuated and rehoused 100 residents from nearby buildings as a precaution, believe heavy rain may have contributed to the buildings’ collapsing.
But the incident — rare in a major Western city — has already sparked a political row over the quality of housing available to Marseille’s poorest residents.
The neighbourhood is home to many buildings in a similarly poor condition, some of them run by slum landlords. “It’s the homes of the poor that are falling down, and that’s
not a coincidence,” said local lawmaker Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of
the leftwing France Unbowed party.
— AFP
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