This early morning (7:30 local time) in the Italian city of Matera (Matera) a residential building collapsed in Piave street (via Piave). At the moment, rescuers have managed to get six people out of the wreckage, four of whom are not in danger of life, while two were recovered from the rubble in serious condition.
The old man and a 58-year-old woman received numerous bruises and fractures and were urgently taken to the emergency room. According to local media, two people still remain under the debris of a collapsed three-story building: a 58-year-old man and a 31-lazy woman. Rescuers have to sort the rubble manually, so the chances of saving the two victims remaining in the trap are becoming less and less every hour.
“We don’t know how many people were in the building when it collapsed,” said Mayor Matera Salvatore Adduce, who arrived at the scene as soon as he was informed.
One of the residents of the four-apartment building later explained that the building was built in the first half of the last century, but the living conditions in it were quite satisfactory.
At the time of the collapse of the perennial building, construction work was underway to restore the building, but experts cannot yet claim that this was the cause of the accident.
Now ambulance crews and the Ministry of Emergencies are working at the scene. "Dismantling the wreckage of this building is very dangerous: several parts of the house may collapse. At the moment, five rescue teams are participating in the operation," Luca Cari, who led the rescue operation, told reporters. "We already called a group with a search dog so that the animal would try to determine in which part of the house there are two more people." For the safety of residents of neighboring houses located down Piave Street, where the building collapsed, an urgent evacuation was carried out, and traffic was suspended.
A year ago, a similar story happened in the historic center of the Italian city of Palermo: two residential buildings collapsed there.
As a result of the accident, three people were killed and seven were injured. Residents of apartments in an old building noticed that cracks crept along the walls, which they reported to firefighters. The arrived team managed to evacuate almost all the people, but several people still remained in the building when it split in two and collapsed. The wreckage of the building fell on neighboring houses, causing significant damage to their roof and walls.
According to numerous sources, such tragic incidents are far from uncommon in sunny Italy. Illegal construction is thriving in the country with might and main and construction standards for residential and industrial buildings are not respected. As a rule, similar stories occur when additional floors are attached to old houses, as a result of which the structures simply can not stand and collapse.
