By Maria Tsvetkova
NEW YORK, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Rescue teams worked through torrential rain on Thursday in search of victims still buried in the rubble of a New York City apartment building collapse that killed at least eight people and prompted Mayor Zohran Mamdani to order an investigation into dozens of linked construction sites.
A day after Wednesday’s late-afternoon collapse in the city’s Brooklyn borough, Mamdani said the city would examine five companies associated with a construction site adjacent to the collapse and 100 more sites connected with those entities.
The construction site was undergoing excavation work that started earlier this year, historical satellite imagery showed. An official notice filed by a construction company in September informed authorities that the earthwork included “rock blasting,” official records showed.
Six people were found dead in the wreckage and two others died later from their injuries, city officials told reporters at the scene of the collapse. Two of those killed were children. The six adults killed included two construction workers.
Those injured in the collapse and its aftermath stood at 18, including four of the firefighters who led the rescue effort, officials said.
Municipal building inspectors fanned out across the city to conduct inspections of the other sites “to ensure that if there is anything for New Yorkers to be worried about that we are on the scene and we are doing something about it,” the mayor said at a press conference.
“If there is anyone or any entity operating in this city that bears responsibility for what happened, we will hold them fully accountable,” Mamdani said.
The apartment building, which Mamdani said was home to several immigrant families, was built in 1930 and consisted of four residential units, according to official records. Two Ecuadoreans were among the dead.
The building collapsed around 4 p.m. (2100 GMT) on Wednesday and destroyed a wall of an adjacent residential block, exposing a staircase, closets and a bedroom.
Three other addresses were ordered vacated on the same side of the street as a precaution until safety inspections could be conducted, officials said.
On Thursday, two excavators were seen at the construction site clearing the debris under pouring rain. Mamdani said rescue work by some 250 personnel was continuing around the clock.”We will be here until we are 100% sure there are no more people trapped,” Fire Department Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore told reporters. “We always assume that there are more people there until we can access the ground. So until we remove some of the bigger debris and are able to search beneath them, this will remain a rescue operation.”
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova in New York; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Howard Goller)
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