Fujian hotel collapse under investigation

The collapse of a hotel building in Quanzhou, East China's Fujian province on Saturday night took place during interior renovation work and the building's owner surnamed Yang had been summoned by police, Xinhua News Agency reported.

According to Zhang Yi, director of the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Department in Quanzhou's Licheng district, where the incident happened, the steel-structured building covers a 0.33 hectare area with its seven floors covering a construction area of about 7,000 square meters.

Building construction started in 2013 and it became the 66-room Xinjia Hotel in 2018, which opened for business in June the same year.

Zhang noted that the building's ground floor had six rooms, two of which were once rented out to a supermarket. Before Spring Festival this year, the owner took back the two rooms and began to remodel them.

At 7 pm on Saturday, the owner received a phone call from the construction workers at the site saying that a pillar on the ground floor of the building was abnormal. Three or four minutes later, the whole building collapsed, Zhang said.

An investigation is still going on to confirm whether the collapse was caused by the modification work or due to the building's original structure, Zhang added.