Eight people have been killed and at least 17 injured after an apartment building collapsed into a neighbouring construction site in Brooklyn, New York, as rescuers continued searching the rubble for possible survivors.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed the death toll following Wednesday’s collapse in the Flatbush neighbourhood.
Three firefighters were among those injured, Mamdani said on Thursday, while the New York City Fire Department earlier told Reuters that four people were in critical condition.
The three-storey building collapsed at around 16:00 (21:00 GMT) on Wednesday, falling into an adjoining construction site where excavation work was under way.
Officials said the number of residents inside the 1930s-era building at the time of the collapse remained unclear. It was also unknown how many workers were at the construction site.
Fire Department Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said seven children were among those affected but did not confirm whether any children were among the dead.
A fire crew already in the neighbourhood arrived within a minute of the collapse and began pulling victims from the debris, authorities said at a press conference on Wednesday evening.
New York television station WABC-TV reported that at least four survivors, including a pregnant woman, were rescued from the wreckage between two and two and a half hours after the collapse.
Around 250 firefighters and emergency medical personnel responded to the disaster, according to the fire department.
Rescue teams, assisted by search dogs, combed through the wreckage and removed debris bucket by bucket, searching for anyone who might still be trapped beneath the rubble, local television footage showed.
Fire Department Chief John Esposito warned that a thorough search of the site could take several days.
He said rescue teams would need that time for the entire site to be “searched for all potential victims”.
“We do not know how many people are missing overall,” he said.
Mamdani said the city’s Department of Buildings and law enforcement officials had launched an investigation to determine what caused the building to collapse.
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