Three people were killed and two injured after a ground-plus-three residential building collapsed in CBD Belapur area early on Saturday.
The two injured persons were pulled out of the rubble after the incident in Shahbaz village.
The scale of the tragedy could have been bigger had 52 other residents not been evacuated in time after cracks were noticed in the building.
“The four-storey building with 13 residential units and three shops collapsed early this morning. A man and a woman who were trapped under the rubble were rescued and admitted to a hospital,” Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) Commissioner Kailas Shinde said.
The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the fire brigade launched a rescue operation. Around noon, the body of a man was recovered from under the debris, while the bodies of two others were recovered hours later, a civic official said.
The deceased were identified as Mohammad Miraj Altaf Hussain (30), Miraj Saif Ansari (24) and Safique Ahmed Rahmat Ali Ansari (28). Their bodies were sent to a government hospital for post-mortem, he said.
The two who were pulled out alive were Lalauddin Nazir Pathan, 23, and his wife Ruksar Lalauddin Pathan, 19, the official said, adding they are being treated at Vashi General Hospital.
The building, Indira Nivas, inSector 19, was 13 years old and was built on a gaothan plot; it did not have acompletion or occupancy certificate, an official said.
“At around 3.45am, I got a call from the lady who stays below my flat saying that there is a crack in the building. She did not have everyone’s number but I had. I started calling everyone asking them to vacate the building. We all ran out,” said Zoya Deshmukh, a survivor.
“By 4.30am the building collapsed. On Friday, someone had told me that something at the salon on the ground floor was cracking. I assumed that some work was going on. We all would have died if I had not got the call,” he said.
Fire officer Purushottam Jadhav said, “We got a call at around 4.50am at CBD Belapur fire station about the collapse. When we reached, we found two people stuck under the debris. We pulled them out alive.”
“I got an alert at around 6.15am. Our team was in Badlapur for the past three days due to Ulhas River flooding. We immediately diverted the team to Belapur,” NDRF commander Sushant Sethi said.
When the rescue operations started, as per the orders of NDRF, residents of two other nearby buildings were asked to vacate. “We were going to use heavy drilling machines to break through the debris and we did not want any untoward incident happening at the other buildings,” Sethi said.
Meanwhile, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who was in Delhi for Niti Aayog’s governing council meeting, spoke to the NMMC commissioner and asked him to provide assistance to the injured and affected persons, an official release by the Thane district administration said.
