Marseille building collapse: body found as rescuers continue search
The body of a man has been discovered in the ruins of two dilapidated buildings that collapsed in the centre of Marseille on Monday.
The city prosecutor, Xavier Tarabeux, confirmed the death as rescue teams scrambled to find survivors in the rubble.
“We have found the body of a man who has died. The operation will continue. We are still looking at there being between five and eight victims; people of whom we have no news,” Tarabeux said.
The French interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said the rescue operation was “meticulous and delicate”, much of which had to be carried out by hand.
“The searchers have found some survival pockets so there is perhaps hope there may be people still alive,” he added.
About 80 firefighters were combing through the remains. A political row is brewing over the condition of the two buildings, with about 6,000 properties in Marseille in a dilapidated state, officials said.
Castaner said he was not in Marseille to fuel the debate, saying: “I am here to accompany the men and women trying to save lives. The polemic can come later, the investigation now. Everyone is trying to saving lives. That is the urgency. For as long as there is hope the fire service will continue to fight to save lives.”
The minister said the building that was occupied, No 65 rue d’Aubagne, had undergone a “technical inspection” on 18 October. While concerns about its state were raised, there was no decision to evacuate or stop anyone living inside.
Renaud Muselier, the president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, added: “We have no news. Teams have worked through the night in difficult conditions. It’s been raining so it’s complicated. The one positive thing is that they have found potential breathing spaces.”
No 63 was derelict and supposedly empty but may have been occupied by squatters. It fell first, pulling down No 65, which was occupied, and partially damaging No 67, which fire services were forced to pull down entirely.
”The risk is that it’s a house of cards. It was a dilapidated building but
there were owners and tenants there. It wasn’t a slum,” Muselier said.
The buildings – one condemned and supposedly vacant, the other containing apartments – gave way after 9am on Tuesday. In the place where they had stood, a large gap appeared once the dust and debris settled.
Throughout the night, emergency services combed through the 15-metredeep rubble left by the collapse.
working all night, search teams removed parts of the building from the road under which they found a crushed car.
Muselier said that among the missing was a woman who had failed to collect her daughter from school and another woman who rarely left her home in the building.
Sophie, a 25-year-old philosophy student, who was living in one of the destroyed buildings, had stayed with her parents the night before the collapse. “For several days the doors to several flats wouldn’t close, or had difficulty closing, including mine. I was afraid of being imprisoned in my home with the door blocked,” she told AFP.
At No 65 rue d’Aubagne, nine of the 10 apartments were occupied.
Marseille fire services said two people who were in the street when the buildings collapsed were treated for light injuries.
Firefighters deliberately brought down most of a third building due to concerns the unstable structure might cave in on top of search crews and sniffer dogs combing the rubble of the other buildings. The late afternoon demolition released further dust clouds.
Authorities said one building had been condemned as substandard and was assumed to be unoccupied, but the other was inhabited.
Thick dust covered cars around the site near Marseille’s famous Old Port. Images of the buildings before they collapsed, visible on Google Street View, showed that one of the buildings was clearly in poor repair, with boarded-up windows and large visible cracks on the facade before it collapsed.
Sabine Bernasconi, the local mayor for that part of Marseille, said one of the buildings was subject to an evacuation order but could not say for sure that squatters were not using it.
The regional prefecture urged people to avoid the area and make way for emergency services.