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A 25-story building has collapsed today after burning for over 90 minutes in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/w...-collapse.html
Fire in São Paulo, Brazil, Brings Down a High-Rise Building
A high-rise tower in São Paulo, Brazil, collapsed early Tuesday after a fire raged through the building and spread to two other structures nearby. At least one person was believed to have died.
The collapsed building, which reached more than 20 stories high, was a former federal police facility that was inhabited by about 150 squatters, city officials said, but it appeared that the vast majority of them escaped the blaze.
The blaze highlighted the shortage of affordable housing in the city. Márcio França, governor of São Paulo state, estimated that 150 downtown buildings in the city are illegally occupied by squatters, living in substandard conditions.
A person was trapped on an upper floor and was calling for help when the building collapsed, and it is very likely that the person was killed, a spokesman for the São Paulo Fire Department said. He said firefighters had conducted interviews with many people who had lived in the building intermittently, trying to determine whether anyone else might have been inside when it collapsed.
“We had 167 men on location when it happened — that is a huge deployment for us,” said the spokesman, who is not authorized to give his name. “What happened today was a tragedy.”
Video shot from a nearby structure showed flames spitting from the lower and middle floors before a sudden collapse.
Jose Antonio da Silva, a street cleaner, told Globo TV: “I lost my TV, my bicycle, clothes, I lost a lot of things. But thank God I didn’t lose my children, for me the most important thing.”
Firefighters said the blaze began in the high rise at around 1:30 a.m., and later spread to a commercial building across the street and an adjacent church. By early afternoon, the fire had been reduced to some remaining hot spots, but most of the firefighters remained on the scene, searching for possible survivors or victims.
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A high-rise tower in São Paulo, Brazil, collapsed early Tuesday after a fire raged through the building and spread to two other structures nearby. At least one person was believed to have died.
The collapsed building, which reached more than 20 stories high, was a former federal police facility that was inhabited by about 150 squatters, city officials said, but it appeared that the vast majority of them escaped the blaze.
The blaze highlighted the shortage of affordable housing in the city. Márcio França, governor of São Paulo state, estimated that 150 downtown buildings in the city are illegally occupied by squatters, living in substandard conditions.
A person was trapped on an upper floor and was calling for help when the building collapsed, and it is very likely that the person was killed, a spokesman for the São Paulo Fire Department said. He said firefighters had conducted interviews with many people who had lived in the building intermittently, trying to determine whether anyone else might have been inside when it collapsed.
“We had 167 men on location when it happened — that is a huge deployment for us,” said the spokesman, who is not authorized to give his name. “What happened today was a tragedy.”
Video shot from a nearby structure showed flames spitting from the lower and middle floors before a sudden collapse.
Jose Antonio da Silva, a street cleaner, told Globo TV: “I lost my TV, my bicycle, clothes, I lost a lot of things. But thank God I didn’t lose my children, for me the most important thing.”
Firefighters said the blaze began in the high rise at around 1:30 a.m., and later spread to a commercial building across the street and an adjacent church. By early afternoon, the fire had been reduced to some remaining hot spots, but most of the firefighters remained on the scene, searching for possible survivors or victims.
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