Mumbai, Oct 3
In the second fatal incident of its kind in two days, a 36-year-old man was killed when two slabs of a five-storey building crashed on him in south Mumbai on Thursday.
The BMC Disaster Control said that the incident was reported around 10.15 a.m. from the United Chambers Building of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, in Grant Road east.
The second and first floor slabs of the ground-plus-five floor building suddenly came crashing down one after the other, trapping and seriously injuring one person who was present on the premises,
The man was extricated from the debris by the rescue teams comprising the Mumbai Police and Mumbai Fire Brigade (MFB) besides local volunteers, and rushed to the nearby Sir J.J. Hospital.
The victim, identified as Sagar S. Nikam, was declared dead on admission, as per the BMC but the exact reasons of the double-slab collapse of the MHADA building are not yet clear and shall be probed after the debris clearance works are completed.
The tragedy occurred barely 24 hours after a similar one reported in the eastern suburbs when the balcony of a ground-plus-one storEY house crashed on a slum tenement below in Gandhinagar area of Kurla, on Wednesday afternoon.
The woman who lived in the home -- identified as Lakshmi Trimukhi, 48 -- had come to the balcony which abruptly collapsed and buried her in the debris, leading to severe injuries and her subsequent death.
As per preliminary enquiries by the MFB, the balcony in the slum area may have crashed owing to overloading, leading to the disaster with a fatality, almost four days after the monsoon has started withdrawing from the city.