Race Against Time: Rescue Efforts Continue After South African Building Collapse

On Tuesday night, a multidisciplinary rescue team—which included sniffer dogs—kept looking for the more than thirty people buried beneath the debris at a George, South Africa, building site. There were seventy-five individuals there when the multi-story apartment building they were constructing fell on Monday afternoon. Seven of them, at the very least, have been pronounced deceased.

With several of those transported to the hospital in critical condition and it being well over 30 hours since the accident, the death toll is probably going to increase. The head of the province’s Western Cape disaster management services, Colin Deiner, said that the search and rescue operation would probably take at least three days.

“We’re going to give it the absolute maximum time to see how many people we can rescue,” Deiner declared during a news conference. “Working with concrete breakers and drillers close to people makes things extremely, very difficult.”

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Deiner had earlier in the day claimed that several of the workers were immobile due to limbs stuck under concrete. “Our primary worry is prolonged entrapment, in which case a person’s body parts become squeezed and they require medical attention. We arrived with our medics as fast as we could,” he stated.

In order to listen for any survivors, Deiner stated, they gave the order to everyone to be silent and turn off machinery. In fact, Deiner recalled, “We were hearing people through the rubble.”.

The George municipality said social workers were providing support to the workers’ family and friends who had gathered at the adjacent municipal buildings. Though a criminal case was started and authorities were beginning their inquiries into the tragedy, there was no instant word on why the structure abruptly collapsed. 

A dust cloud rose over the neighborhood at 2.09 p.m. Monday when the concrete structure and metal scaffolding collapsed, according to CCTV footage from a nearby house. Police and the provincial government would conduct inquiries, according to Western Cape Province Premier Alan Winde.

The provincial administration has engaged a structural engineering company to ascertain the reason for the collapse and assign blame. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa called for inquiries into the reason for the collapse and sent a message expressing his sympathies to the victims’ families.