Fourteen killed in three-building collapse in Brazil

Jan 28, 2012, 0:38 GMT

Rio de Janeiro - The death toll climbed to 14 from the collapse of three buildings in central Rio de Janeiro, officials confirmed Friday, but the cause of the accident still remained unclear.

Around 20 people were still missing from Wednesday's collapse of three adjacent office buildings - 20, 10 and four storeys high - in the heart of the city. Civil Defence commander Sergio Simoes has said there is virtually no chance of finding survivors.

'Unfortunately, we no longer think there are survivors. All the bodies were very badly injured, which shows that there was a very strong impact of the (building) structure. We have not retrieved any bodies that did not have some sort of trauma,' said Simoes, who is coordinating rescue efforts, on Thursday.

At the time, most of the occupants had left work and the buildings were nearly empty.

The nearly 100 firemen at the scene have reached the point where they believe they will find the missing.

'These people are concentrated near the stairs, which makes us believe that they tried to get out of the building when they felt signs of the collapse,' he said.

Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes said 15,000 tons of rubble - 80 per cent of the total - had been removed from the site by early Friday.

There were still no 'definitive answers' to the cause of the accident, he said.

Investigators were reportedly focusing on possible structural defects in one of the buildings, most likely the tallest, because of illegal work by the occupants to alter at least two floors.

'We are collecting information from the experts who were at the site, and everything will be verified. Nobody can say yet whether it was caused by structural damage. There are several hypotheses that will be assessed and analyzed,' said Paes.

Sydnei Menezes, the head of Rio's Council of Architecture and Urban Planning, said there had been no sign of structural problems in the buildings. 'There was a sudden collapse of the structure. It was an unprecedented event.'

The accident has renewed concerns about safety in Rio de Janeiro, which is to host the final of the 2014 football World Cup and the Olympic Games in 2016.