A young boy managed to save around 75 residents of a two-storey building in Dombivli, near Mumbai, in Maharashtra before it collapsed early Thursday morning.
The 42-years-old residential building housed some 18 families and about 75 residents. The incident took place at 4:30am IST in the Kopar area of Dombivli in Thane district.
According to a report by ANI, it was a teenager who was binge watching a web series at the time who managed to get the residents out to safety. The young boy, Kunal Mohite, told ANI that he was watching a show till the wee hours of the morning when he saw a part of one of the kitchens in the building collapse. That is when he alerted all the residents in the building and urged them to vacate.
The occupants too heard some pillars of the building crushing and managed to leave before the entire building came crumbling down, Dombivli ward officer Bharat Pawar said.
An official said that the residents got out just in time.
The building has been on the list of dangerous properties of the KMDC for a while now.
The KDMC, four years ago, had issued notice to the building asking to vacate it. The officials from Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation said that they have found that since night, building plaster had started falling down but the residents ignored the warnings.
Kunal Mohite | Collected
“We received a notice from the authorities but the people residing here are financially very weak. They had no
While the residents of the Dombivli building may have unhurt, Maharashtra, especially Mumbai and Thane, have a long history of old, dilapidated buildings collapsing.
Last month, 38 persons had lost their lives when the 45-year-old Jilani building crashed in Bhiwandi.
In March, the Maharashtra Legislative Council was informed that incidents of building collapse claimed 106 lives in Mumbai from 2015 to 2019.
"There were 1,472 incidents of building collapse (in Mumbai city and suburbs) during 2015 to 2019 in which 106 people lost their lives while another 344 were injured," Urban Development Minister Eknath Shinde, had said in a written reply.
According to some estimates, there are more than 14,000 buildings in Mumbai that are over 50 years old and which, due to age-related instability and lack of maintenance, are at risk of collapse.