Rescue teams yesterday morning restarted the search for missing people after the collapse of the Cologne’s six-story city archive center and two neighboring buildings.
Overnight, police lowered the number of missing people to two, while other reports spoke of five missing. Earlier, police had spoken of nine missing, but subsequently lowered the number.
Rescuers worked during the night to prevent the building from subsiding further, while firemen started to retrieve documents from the basement of an adjoining building that was not destroyed in the collapse.
A police spokesman said sniffer dogs used to search the rubble for those still missing may have detected victims. Rescue efforts could only begin when rubble from the roof had been removed, for which heavy machinery was needed.
“A quick rescue is not possible,” director of Cologne’s fire department Stefan Neuhoff said, but it was unlikely that there were any air holes in the rubble.
Speculation about the cause of the collapse is focused on new building work for the city’s underground transit system, which runs directly below the archives.
Meanwhile, staff members accused the city authorities of having ignored earlier reports of damage to the building.
City authorities rejected the accusations, saying that expert studies dating from December said that cracks in the building did not affect its structural integrity.
In addition to possible human casualties, the damage to the city’s historical archives was immense.
The archive building collapsed at about 2pm on Tuesday, ripping open and dragging down parts of two adjacent buildings that contained apartments and an amusement arcade. A huge cloud of dust enveloped the site.
Alerted by rumbling sounds that preceded the collapse, all staff and visitors at the Cologne archive were able to get out in time.
Parents at a nearby fast-food outlet grabbed their children and ran.
“I heard a giant bang and then suddenly saw this giant gray dust cloud,” said Mustafa Goresme, 18, who watched from the restaurant.
Florian Hacke, who lives two buildings away, said he ran outside after he heard a creaking noise and cracks opened up in his ceiling.
Work was being done on a new subway line under the street on which the building stood. The roof of the subway construction site also collapsed, but officials said they did not believe anyone was trapped in there.
Subway project leader Rolf Papst also said there had been no major work in the last 30 days.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS