Three floors of a Rome apartment building by the River Tiber collapsed early on Friday.
No one was killed or injured as the building was evacuated
after a resident heard strange noises and raised the alarm.
The building collapsed before the eyes of 10 families who
were evacuated, sources said.
The incident may have been caused by building work in an
apartment, which damaged the structure and caused the top three
floors, the fifth, sixth and seventh, to cave in.
Construction of the building was completed in 1939.
"An investigation is under way," said Raffaele Clemente,
the commander of Rome's municipal police.
"It seems that work was being done and we have to see what
type of interaction there was between the work and the collapse.
We'll know something in the early afternoon".
The woman who raised the alarm, Agea, said those who
caused the collapse "must pay".
"I didn't do anything, I just called the emergency
services," she said when asked about how she felt about having
saved lives.
Traffic in the northern part of the city was tangled on
Friday due to the collapse, which affected the building on
Lungotevere Flaminio 70 that also houses the Teatro Olimpico, a
popular local theatre currently hosting a Max Giusti show
through January 24.
"The Teatro Olimpico is compromised, it won't be open for a
little while. We don't know if the structure is stable, but
certainly we can't let spectators into a building like this,"
Clemente said.
Building resident Massimo Goffredo, an architect who lives
on the fourth and sixth floors, said partitions that held up
sustaining walls were removed during the work in the apartment
on the fifth floor.
"I could see it from my window. The idea was of a large
open space. I didn't know if they had shored it up or not,"
Goffredo said.
"There were also enormous, really heavy cement pots (on the
fifth floor), full of soil and water, which we had complained
about several times. I think the weight of those contributed to
the collapse," he said.
Building resident Andrea Ciacchella, a civil engineer, said
the floors collapsed "around 2 a.m." and that firefighters were
about to go back in for a second inspection just prior.
"Luckily they didn't go back in," Ciacchella said.
"During the collapse I didn't see anything, there was a big
cloud, it seemed like the Twin Towers," he said.
One building resident said he also believes the work on the
building's 5th floor is the cause of the collapse.
"The building was remodeled two months ago, and the main
risks were avoided," he said.
"Something must have happened on the fifth floor, because
the rest of the building held, and in fact the floor below is
holding the weight of the rubble by itself," the resident said.
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