Ten persons were left dead after a portion of a building in Kalwa, Thane, collapsed on Tuesday afternoon.
Till 9.30 pm, the authorities had retrieved the bodies of 10 persons — four women and six men. Four injured people, including a 10-year-old boy and a 30-year-old woman, were rescued from under the debris.
Located in the congested Gaondevi area in Kalwa (West), a portion of Sonubai Niwas, a three-storey structure housing 12 tenements, came crashing down at around 4.30 pm in the afternoon.
“We heard a loud thud and suddenly, a cloud of dust arose all around. We suspected that it would be our adjacent building as it was in a visibly bad condition,” said Mr Naturam Patil, a resident of the neighbouring building.
Sonubai Niwas was built around two decades ago by one Jaywant Mhatre who was living in the building till a few years ago.
Mr Mhatre had shifted from the third floor to the first floor, and had eventually moved out to another building in the vicinity.
All the 12 families, many of whom are feared to have died in the collapse, belonged to middle-class families who were not able to afford the steep rent in better structures. One half of the building that was bisected by a staircase collapsed like a pack of cards without any warning on Tuesday. Though the other half is still standing, residents were hurriedly evacuated to safety.
Officials suspect that the collapse may also have been triggered by the tremors of the earthquake (2.5 on the Richter scale) that was felt in parts of Mulund and Thane at around 1.15 am. Incidentally, some of the residents were on the verge of evacuating on Tuesday after the tremors and had employed labourers for shifting their belongings. The labourers are also feared to be among the casualties.
The residents of Sonubai Niwas were not as fortunate as the residents of Babu Hafeez Jindani building, also in Kalwa.
They had felt their structure sinking and escaped in the nick of time on August 3.
MLA Jitendra Awhad had then remarked that there would be many more collapses due to the many poorly constructed buildings on marshy land.
Though the authorities have employed a bulldozer to facilitate the removal of the debris, rescue operations have been hampered due to the lack of space for manoeuvring vehicles.