NEW YORK: A four-storey parking facility collapsed in New York City’s lower Manhattan near the stock exchange on Tuesday, killing one worker and injuring five others who were inside the structure.

Emergency personnel using robotic devices after firefighters were pulled back from the fallen structure due to unstable conditions checked the site for any further casualties, but officials said they believed all victims had been accounted for.

No foul play was suspected.

“We have no reason to believe that this was anything other than a structural collapse,” police commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters.

Video footage from the scene, in Manhattan’s financial district blocks from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange, showed a rescue operation getting underway and multiple cars stacked on top of one another amid crumpled slabs of concrete.

One person was pronounced dead on the scene, four more were taken to hospitals for injuries and a sixth individual who was hurt declined medical treatment.

Firefighters ordered out of the structure had still been inside conducting searches as “the building was continuing to collapse”, a fire brigade official said.

Robot devices were then deployed, he said, marking the first time city firefighters had flown a drone aircraft into a fallen building to conduct a search.

Pace University, a private college campus whose students, faculty and staff use the parking structure, was evacuated as a precaution, authorities said.

“This building is completely unstable,” New York mayor Eric Adams told reporters.

Records showed that the structure, at the site of the collapse had been cited for 45 violations, including 25 since 2003, many related to its elevators.

One 2003 filing noted that “ceiling slab cracks exist” as well as “defective concrete with exposed rear cracks”.

Published in Dawn, April 20th, 2023