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Picture Courtesy: (IOL) Disaster and emergency personnel continue to work tirelessly in a search and rescue mission at the multi-story apartment building that collapsed in George, Western Cape, on Monday.
(The Post News)– The multi-story apartment building that collapsed on the afternoon of Monday, May 6, has claimed 27 lives. The building, located at 75 Victoria Street in George, Western Cape, was under construction when it collapsed. It has been a week since the building collapsed, and disaster and emergency personnel have since been on site, trying to rescue the workers that were trapped when the incident occurred.
The search and rescue team has not given up on its mission to search for and rescue the trapped workers. George Municipality confirmed in a media statement that it is still a search and rescue mission. The team still believes that there is still life underneath the rubble. Gerhard Otto, the Garden Rout Municipality head of disaster management, said that there is hope that more people trapped could still be alive.
He expressed that he is hopeful because it has only been seven days and there is a man who was rescued alive after 13 days of being trapped in the rubble when an earthquake recently hit Turkey. For this reason, they will continue searching in the hopes that they will find someone alive. Meanwhile, the Western Cape Forensic Pathology Service said it was having difficulties identifying the bodies that were recently recovered from the rubble, as they are in a state of decomposition.
During a media briefing, Floyd Herwels, who is the assistant director at the George forensic pathology service, told the media that when conducting the identification process, they relied on fingerprinting and DNA matching because of the challenges they faced with visual identification. George Municipality fire chief, Neels Bernard, said they are currently working at a slow pace to make sure that the bodies are carefully extracted and that they do not cause more damage to the bodies.
On Sunday afternoon, the Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, together with General Fannie Maselola, the national police commissioner, and the deputy national commissioner for policing and special operations, Lieutenant-General Tebello Mosikili, visited the site of the collapsed building and addressed family members of the victims at George Town Hall. Cele asked the families of the victims to be patient with the police department, as it cannot speak about the details surrounding the cause of the collapse.
He also confirmed that the police department has begun its investigation on the site. The police can only give out information that has been found through the investigation. According to Cele, the identity documents of the workers are needed to establish who was present on the day of the incident, who has been pronounced dead, and who is still trapped in the rubble. He pleaded with the owners and employers to provide the police with all the necessary information and to be in contact with the families of the victims to show that they sympathize with them.
This afternoon, at 02:09 p.m., the exact time the building collapsed, all the teams stopped working and gathered on site to observe a moment of silence. The search and rescue team has recovered 14 more bodies since Saturday evening. There were 81 workers present on site when the building collapsed, and 56 have been retrieved, while 25 remain trapped. Out of the 56, 27 have been declared dead, and 13 are still in the hospital.
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