A three-story mixed-use building in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood collapsed into an open construction site Wednesday afternoon, killing at least two people and sending 19 patients through the city’s emergency system, as New York City firefighters continued searching the rubble for anyone still trapped.
The Fire Department received the first call just after 4 p.m., at 4:01 according to one account, and the Department of Buildings said crews were excavating on the adjacent lot when the building fell. Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani described the work next door as excavation. Fire Chief of Department John Esposito said construction workers were actively working at the time of the collapse. The cause is under investigation by the Department of Buildings and law enforcement, and no one in authority has said what brought the structure down.
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The casualty count rose through the evening. Early reports spoke of one person dead and about 10 injured. By the mayor’s news conference at about 8 p.m., the Fire Department said two people had died and 19 patients had been treated, a total that includes the two dead and one firefighter with minor injuries. Four people were in critical condition, 12 were stable and seven of those treated were children. Rescuers pulled several people from the rubble, including a pregnant woman. Her husband told a local reporter, “She is alive.”
Officials were unable to say how many remained in the collapse zone. Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore of the Fire Department said the operation would be prolonged, and that moving too quickly could disturb the debris piles with a detrimental effect on anyone beneath them. Crews worked with a drone, buckets and vacuum trucks, and officials warned that the search could last several days because of unstable conditions. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said responders had to navigate precarious wreckage and dangerous voids below the surface. He said the first units reached the scene one minute after the first call. Esposito said that crew had been returning from another emergency nearby and began search-and-rescue work immediately. “This was a devastating collapse,” Mamdani said.
The location needs a caveat, because the records disagree. The Fire Department responded to 2625 Bedford Avenue, the address of the construction lot. City building records identify the collapsed building as 1321 Flatbush Avenue, and one early report gave 1325 Flatbush Avenue. The two sites meet at the intersection of Flatbush and Bedford avenues. Records describe the collapsed structure as three stories with four residential units and five units in all. Early accounts differed on how much of it fell, with one citing only the rear section and others describing a full collapse. The neighboring structure lost an exterior wall, exposing its interior, and officials said they took steps to prevent a secondary collapse.
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The Department of Buildings has sent inspectors to check the stability of nearby structures, and the city set up a help center for affected residents at the Flatbush YMCA on Flatbush Avenue. The Police Department patrolled the site, and Flatbush Avenue is closed from Clarendon Road to Bedford Avenue. Flatbush is home to a predominantly Black and Afro-Caribbean community.
City records contain several entries on the lot, though none is yet linked to the collapse. Tigani said the approved plan for the site is for a three-story building. Zoning records show plans for a nine-story building with 64 residential units and a ground-floor grocery, which he said have not been approved. In April, the Buildings Department issued a violation to a demolition contractor on the lot, finding that an entire building was demolished despite an order to stop all demolition work. A separate account puts a set of violations on a project next door in May, including work during a stop-work order, missing overhead protection and work that did not match approved drawings. The record also shows the April violation is now listed as resolved. The notice does not say why the city had ordered the work stopped. The reports do not establish that any of these violations contributed to what happened Wednesday.
The demolition contractor declined an interview. In an email, it attributed the violation to a missing fire extinguisher and housekeeping issues, and said its demolition was finished months ago and was not the digging under way on Wednesday. The Eastern Updates could not reach the lot’s owner or the architect listed in city records, and neither had commented publicly in the reports reviewed. City housing records separately list 98 violations against 1321 Flatbush Avenue since 1972, a count that does not say what they were or how serious.
A note on the figures: the reports available to The Eastern Updates do not agree on every number. One early account counted one dead and at least 10 injured, a later one 12 injured with six critical, and the Fire Department’s evening count was two dead, four critical and 12 stable. This dispatch uses the Fire Department’s later count. No Thursday update was available at the time of writing, so the toll could have changed.
Flatbush Avenue remains closed from Clarendon Road to Bedford Avenue until further notice.
