A six-storey apartment building collapsed early on Wednesday in the west coast city of Aalesund after it was hit by a rockslide, injuring 15 people and leaving five others missing, police said.
The search for survivors was hampered when a second rockslide hit the crumpled building, which was partly built into a steep hillside. A fire smouldered amid the debris, police said.
”There has been a new slide in the same place. It hit the building and shook it,” Aalesund police operations leader Magne Tjoennoey said. ”The fire has also flared up again, and it is making our rescue efforts very difficult.”
He said about 20 people were believed to have been inside, based on the building’s normal occupancy, when the bottom floors caved at 3.37am local time.
The building was hit by a rockslide, but investigators were not sure ”whether that was a direct or indirect cause of the collapse”, Tjoennoey said by telephone.
The number of people listed as unaccounted for was reduced to five from six, after police confirmed that one person earlier feared missing had not been in the building when it collapsed.
”We don’t know where they are or whether they were in the building or elsewhere,” Tjoennoey said about those still missing.
Photographs and television footage from the scene in Aalesund, about 350km north-west of Oslo, showed smoke billowing from the twisted bottom floors of the building, with sagging balconies and a contorted glass entryway.
The building, built in 2003, was surrounded by rescue personnel, using ladders and cranes to search for the missing people. Firefighters were cooling parts of the building with water, hoping to prevent fires and smoke.
A helicopter and rescuers from around the region were called to the scene, regional rescue official Eirik Walle said.
Kristen Rasmussen, a doctor at the scene, said there appeared to have been a rockslide from the hillside into which the apartment block was built, according to the Aalesund newspaper Sunnmoersposten. The newspaper said residents described the building seeming to leap forward several metres and then collapse.
Tjoennoey said all available police, rescue and fire resources had been mobilised. He added the search would be difficult because the bottom two floors of the building were badly damaged.
”The bottom floors are collapsed. There is a big risk in going inside, and there is also the risk of fire,” he said. He could not say when the search might begin of lower floors for people who might be trapped in the near-freezing weather.
Rescuers were also bringing in dogs to search the debris, and residents of a neighbouring apartment house were evacuated as a precaution, police said.
The Norwegian news agency NTB reported that none of those brought to the hospital so far had serious injuries. — Sapa-AP