Eight people were killed and 18 injured when a three-story apartment building suddenly collapsed into an adjacent construction pit in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood, and city officials said Thursday they are investigating whether excavation work next door contributed to the disaster.
The building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue, constructed in the 1930s, contained apartments and a ground-floor store. Witnesses described hearing a loud boom around 4 p.m. Wednesday as the structure gave way and fell into the pit of a neighboring site, where a new 64-unit residential building with a ground-floor grocery store had been approved. Construction workers were performing active excavation there at the time. An account filed the night of the collapse, when crews were still searching the site, had put the toll at two dead and 19 hurt — a measure of how much the picture changed as rescue work continued into Thursday.
Toll climbs, cause unclear
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said six people were pronounced dead at the scene and two more died later in hospitals; officials said the dead included six adults and two children, and that two of the victims were construction workers. Four of the 18 injured were firefighters, and one remained in critical condition Thursday. More than 250 firefighters responded, working through the night before officials called off the search about 24 hours later, concluding no further victims remained in the rubble.
Mamdani described rescuers who "had only barely survived themselves" turning back "and dug victims out of the rubble," and the city's fire commissioner, Lillian Bonsignore, called the response "incredibly heroic." The husband of one woman pulled alive from the debris told reporters his wife, six months pregnant, had survived: "She is alive... I'm very happy. I'm very happy. I'm very happy."
It remains too early to say what caused the collapse. Ahmed Tigani, head of the city's Department of Buildings, said no code violations had been reported at the building before it fell, but that the property's developer has ties to roughly 100 other sites around the city, all of which are now being reviewed. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said prosecutors were "working closely with the Department of Buildings and our law enforcement partners to determine whether any criminal conduct contributed to this tragedy," and Mamdani said every entity connected to the building and the construction site would be investigated and, if warranted, held accountable. The Fire Department has turned the site over to the buildings department and police for further examination.