(Credit: NNA)
The ceiling of a house collapsed on Friday evening in the Cité Sportive area of southern Beirut, injuring a woman and her child, the MTV news channel reported. A video shot at the scene and circulating on social networks shows residents gathered in the middle of the night following this incident.
Contacted by L'Orient-Le Jour, the Beirut Fire Brigade and the Lebanese Red Cross said they had no further information. A member of the Lebanese Civil Defense stated that there had been no casualties, but gave no further details of the collapse.
The Ghobeiri municipality denied any responsibility for the incident, stressing that it had warned on numerous occasions since 2016, in missives addressed to several administrations, of the danger of buildings constructed "illegally" behind the Cité Sportive complex. These constructions "without permits or respect for technical standards" are "violations of public property," according to the municipal authorities, who called for the prosecution of all those responsible for these infractions.
'An alert and a reminder'
"The collapse of a ceiling in the Cité Sportive area of Beirut is an alert and a reminder, for the municipality and the mohafazat [governorate] of Beirut, about the presence of more than 10,460 buildings in the capital that are in need of renovation, according to a study carried out by our network in 2013, in cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior," said Youssef Faouzi Azzam, director of "Safe Building Alliance," on Saturday. This NGO fights for the renovation of substandard housing. He also called for a comprehensive urban survey of the country's buildings in need of renovation.
However, the number of buildings at risk today is likely far higher than in 2013. Last year, the president of the Lebanese Association of Properties, Andira al-Zouhairi, told L'Orient Today that "more than 16,260 buildings are at risk of collapse across the country," but added that this was an "approximate and non-final" number recorded before the Aug. 4, 2020, Beirut port explosion.
Several cases of partial or complete building collapse have occurred across Lebanon in recent years. Last February, at least four people, including a baby, were killed when a building collapsed in Choueifat, south of Beirut. Nine days earlier, a five-storey building collapsed in the same area, without causing any casualties.
Calls have been made on several occasions for the relevant authorities to identify buildings at risk, but no serious efforts have been made. A building collapse in Mansourieh last year killed eight women, while the most deadly building collapse in the country in recent decades occurred in Fassouh, in the district of Achrafieh, on Jan. 15, 2012, resulting in the deaths of some 20 people.
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.