At Least 7 Die in Building Collapse : 21 Others in Connecticut Feared Trapped; 12 Hospitalized

A high-rise apartment building under construction collapsed Thursday, killing as many as seven workers and burying others under tons of concrete, steel and debris. Twelve workers were hospitalized with injuries.

Police and the mayor’s office reported that 21 workers were believed to be trapped in the rubble.

“The chances of finding anyone alive are very minimal,” Mayor Thomas Bucci told a news conference.

Workers aided by acoustical sensing devices and dogs worked under floodlights throughout the evening, trying to locate other victims from beneath the two-story mountain of debris. Six cranes were used to gingerly lift huge slabs of concrete. Police with dogs sniffing for life carefully inched their way across the precarious pile that once was the skeleton of the apartment building.

Across from the construction site, a small crowd of neighbors stood in a light drizzle while construction workers--some of the 69 who reported to work Thursday on the project--searched for their companions.

Ambulances Ring Scene

The scene was ringed by ambulances and other emergency vehicles. Workers using acetylene torches cut through concrete beams twisted like straws. It was a very slow process.

“We haven’t given up hope,” the mayor said. “We’re hoping there are pockets within the destruction where survivors are located.”

Police estimated that it might take more than a week before all the bodies could be recovered.

Norma Bernard, 25, was visiting her mother who lives in a fourth-floor apartment directly across the street from the construction site when the building collapsed.

“I was in my mother’s room. I heard this loud boom,” she said. “My vision was blurred because of the trembling. I saw a large cloud. All the people were running out shaking the dust off them. I ran to the phone and called the ambulance. The whole thing just collapsed.”

Other witnesses told investigators the building seemed to collapse from the left side toward the middle and the whole event seemed to take just seconds.

At a nearby high school, the families of some of the people who had been working at the site of the L’Ambiance Plaza, when the structure collapsed, waited anxiously.

Like ‘a Bombing in Beirut’

“It’s an unbelievable sight to see the steel just torn away. You see the concrete, layer after layer,” Bucci said. “It’s a scene out of Beirut, Lebanon. That’s the only way I can describe it--a bombing in Beirut, Lebanon.”

Some rescue workers said they could hear people shouting from beneath the rubble, but the sound was muffled. Later, the workers said that the shouting had stopped--an ominous sign.

Other people near the site of what was to have been a 13-story, 218-unit apartment house, said the building apparently fell inward in a cloud of dust, concrete and steel. The force of the collapse left thick steel girders twisted like spaghetti.

Builders, using a technique known as “lift-slab” construction, had poured the structure’s concrete floors, which were lifted hydraulically to upper levels of the building. Witnesses said the top floor slab apparently slipped, causing the apartment house and its steel frame to fall inward.

One volunteer worker said he saw “six or seven slabs of concrete pancaked on top of each other.”

At least one construction worker managed to ride one of the concrete floor slabs part way to the ground before leaping to safety. Other workers were not so fortunate.

Jim Beau, a construction worker, was on his lunch break when the building fell at about 1:30 p.m. “I was sitting in my car and all of a sudden it sounded like a bomb,” he said.

Heard ‘Something Snap’

Other workers reported hearing “something snap” and seconds later, the building had collapsed in a huge cloud of dust and debris.

Joseph Walsh, Bridgeport’s police superintendent, told the Associated Press after inspecting the scene and conferring with other rescue officials that it could take as long as a week until all the debris is cleared away and all bodies were recovered.

Most of those injured who were not trapped were taken to hospitals in the minutes immediately after the building collapsed.

Gov. William A. O’Neill left a meeting of New England governors and Canadian officials in nearby Stamford and hurried to the scene.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” he said, after viewing the debris and the rescue efforts. “Now the question is getting the mechanical people here to get the bodies out.”

The $17-million L’Ambiance project was to have been an important addition to the downtown of Bridgeport, an industrial city of 142,600 residents on the Connecticut coast, some 65 miles north of New York City.