At Least 43 Dead, 350 Hurt in Collapse of Thai Hotel : Disaster: American is among those killed. Estimates of missing range from 50 to 200.

A six-story hotel where hundreds of people from around the world were attending conferences came crashing down Friday. At least 43 people died, including an American soldier, and about 350 were injured.

Crews worked into the morning hours looking for dozens trapped under the rubble of the Royal Plaza Hotel in Korat, a provincial capital and commercial center about 130 miles northeast of Bangkok. Air was pumped into the debris.

Early today, rescue workers brought 21 people out from the ruins alive.

The building was a two-story structure to which four additional stories had been added, officials said. An additional floor was being put on when the building collapsed.

Among the dead was a U.S. Air Force master sergeant, still unidentified, who had stopped at the hotel to send a fax, another U.S. serviceman said. The sergeant was reportedly part of an Air Force detachment installing telephone lines at the Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base.

Hospital personnel listed two foreign women among the dead, one from England, one from Japan.

In the hospital morgue, bodies lay on tables, on floors and in the halls. “We’re running out of blankets to cover them with,” an orderly said.

Officials said 276 people suffered serious injuries and 70 others received minor injuries.

Government-run Radio Thailand said about 200 people were attending a Lions Assn. meeting and 100 others were at a teachers seminar at the hotel when it collapsed in midmorning. Police said 13 Americans were registered as guests.

Estimates of those missing ranged from 50 to 200.

Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai visited the hospital to console survivors. The TV news showed him talking with an unidentified woman who described how she crawled through wreckage to escape. “There was a little passage like a mouse’s,” she said. “I tried to get my head out. I didn’t see anything.”