collapsed building

[MaidenScotland]

At least 10 people died in Saturday's collapse of a newly built 11-storey block of flats in Egypt's second city, Alexandria, officials have confirmed.

Rescuers searching for survivors under the rubble found 10 people dead, while five people were brought out alive, the health ministry said.

The collapse destroyed three neighbouring buildings.

Building collapses are not uncommon in Egypt because construction regulations are often ignored.

Residents said the construction quality of the block had been poor.

"The construction base of this building is not designed to take this number of storeys," a neighbour, Mohammed Ahmed, told the Associated Press.

"Lately, we have been hearing the sound of cracking in the building, and suddenly it collapsed."

At least 12 people died when a block of flats collapsed in Alexandria in 2008. Another 33 people were killed in a similar collapse in the city in 2007







Regulations on buildings must be one of the things that are upheld.. this is all too common and I remember a few years ago several buildings just collapsing in Imbaba.

A friend who has lived in Maadi for 50 plus years tells me that the new villa that has been built opposite him is against regulations and without planning but since the revolution many buildings have popped up on land that had no or refused planning.

The building I live in is actually one story too many.

[expatagogo]

As usual, the story has been sanitized for western consumption.

Here's what happened. Two weeks ago, residents in apartment buildings around the new construction filed a complaint with the authorities because their own flats were exhibiting signs of structural degradation as a result of this new, illegal, 14 story building. Their complaint was promptly addressed and an engineer was sent out to the construction site. The engineer noted the building under construction was on a 25 degree tilt. Some time after that, someone got the good idea to take the three top floors off. Then the building pancaked down, and took out three neighboring buildings. As of yesterday, there were 20 known survivors in the rubble, and an unknown number of "informal workers" who were working on the construction site itself.

The Governor of Alexandria resigned shortly before this disaster, citing the lack of security. In his statement afterward, he called all of these thousands and thousands of apartments "time bombs."

Here's a video of the site:

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