Eight killed in Maharashtra building crash

Eight persons from two families were killed when an old, two-storey building collapsed in Maharashtra's Thane district on Sunday, an official said.

The building, Mahadev Nivas, located at Hanuman Tekdi area of Bhiwandi town suddenly crashed around 7 a.m., catching the handful of occupants unawares, said Sub Inspector Jairam Patil of Bhiwandi Control Room

The local fire brigade and disaster management teams from Thane and Kalyan rushed to the crash site and managed to rescue four persons from the debris earlier this morning.

A search is still on for another two or three persons still believed to buried under the rubble, Patil said, even as rescue operations were hampered by intermittent rains.

Among the deceased are the landlord and owner of the building, Sajjanlal Mahadev Gupta, 60 and his wife Sitodevi Sajjanlal Gupta, 55.

Six members - three adults and three children - of the Thakur family living there have been wiped out in the disaster, according to Patil.

They were identified as Dhaniram Thakur, Reshma, Somavati, Shivani (14), Devesh (9) and Naitik (3).

Some time ago, the 35-year-old building was declared as "dangerous" and an evacuation notice served on residents, but many them ignored it, said local legislator Kapil Patil.

While water supply was cut sometime ago, the civic authorities were planning to disconnect the power to the building soon.

Top police and civic officials are supervising the rescue and relief works since the morning.

This is second building crash in a week in the powerloom town of Bhiwandi, which is around 35 km north of Mumbai.

The entire coastal Konkan region including Thane has been battered by heavy rains in the past few days.

Last Sunday (July 31), a building crash in the town's Gaibinagar had claimed nine lives and another 10 were injured.

--IANS

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