Firemen lament loss of life in Brazil building collapse

SAO PAULO - A 22-story abandoned office building occupied by hundreds of squatters was engulfed in flames and collapsed in the center of Sao Paulo early on Tuesday, shooting a massive black cloud of smoke into the sky and red-hot chunks of debris into nearby structures.

At least one person died and three others were missing, a fire department spokesman said. According to authorities, 400 people were registered as living in the building, which belonged to the government.

The cause of the fire was not known.

Live television images in the early morning hours showed a firefighter on an adjacent rooftop talking to a man clinging to a rescue rope and trying to escape from the upper part of the burning building.

Suddenly, the structure collapsed and the man disappeared into the rubble. Authorities said he likely died. In the afternoon, firefighters continued searching for additional victims amid concrete chunks and twisted metal pipes.

A firefighter told the media that they would only have needed 30 more seconds to save the man.

The sergeant described how he and his team climbed onto the roof of a neighboring building - using axes to gain access. He said he urged the man to be calm, to look only at the firefighters, to try to ignore the blazing heat coming from the fire.

"He was secured, he was ready," Diego Pereira da Silva Santos said. "The problem was the building collapsed and the amount of rubble and hot embers that fell on him."

The abandoned former office building had 22 stories, according to the fire department and not 26 stories as reported by some media. It once housed a branch of Brazil's federal police and had been occupied by squatters for the past seven years.

Sao Paulo state Governor Marcio Franca, at the scene, said it was a tragedy waiting to happen.

The city and state governments have been working for years to forcibly remove squatters from buildings in central Sao Paulo, with plans for revitalizing the area.

Franca said about 150 buildings in the region were occupied by organized groups of squatters, who have pressured the government for years to provide housing for the city's homeless.

"There is not even a minimal condition for people to live in there," Franca said. "People live there in desperation. This was a tragedy foretold."

The mayor of Sao Paulo, Bruno Covas, said that the state government had offered to provide housing for the displaced families, and Brazil's president, Michel Temer, also offered federal assistance during a visit to the site.

Reuters - Ap

(China Daily 05/03/2018 page11)