Eight people were injured and one person died after an apartment building collapsed in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sunday, as reported by police.
Television images showed firefighters manually moving rubble from the collapsed five-story building in Kucukcekmece on the European side of the city. Upon his visit to the scene, Istanbul Governor Davut Gul reported the initial recovery of seven people, including two critically injured.
Following that, his office reported the discovery of a body and the rescue of another injured person.
The 36-year-old building collapsed at 8:40 a.m. (0540 GMT), according to the government. Despite the immediate lack of obvious cause, no explosion or earthquake occurred. Businesses occupied the remaining levels of the building, leaving only the top two floors as residential space.
Photographs taken from a camera across the street showed that people waiting to get on a public minibus at the moment of the collapse just avoided getting hit by falling objects.
When a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked areas of southern Turkey and neighboring Syria last year, more than 59,000 people died. The disaster brought to light Turkiye’s poor implementation of construction regulations.
Istanbul, which officially has 16 million people, is located near the North Anatolian Fault. In 1999, a southerly-centered earthquake killed at least 18,000 people. The municipality reports that 3 million people reside in 200,000 buildings that require urgent improvement.
By Ashiya Qureshi
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