Two killed, several others trapped for hours after German hotel collapse
7 August 2024, 14:54
One person is still trapped in the wreckage of the hotel in the western German town of Kroev.
Two people have died and seven others were trapped overnight after part of a hotel in a winemaking town on the Mosel River in western Germany collapsed.
By Wednesday afternoon, all but one had been rescued after the incident in the town of Kroev.
Fourteen people were in the hotel when one storey of the building collapsed at about 11pm local time on Tuesday (10pm BST).
Police said five were able to get out of the building unhurt because they were not in the part that collapsed, but others were left trapped.
Rescuers were able to contact some of them by mobile phone, but reaching them proved to be difficult because the collapse of one storey left two ceilings lying on top of each other, rescuers said.
Joerg Teusch, fire and disaster protection inspector for the Bernkastel-Wittlich district, said: “We have to proceed with caution because the entire building structure is like a house of cards. If we pull on the wrong card, this building is sure to collapse.”
Six people were rescued on Wednesday, and by mid-afternoon only one person was still trapped. Emergency services are in contact with the remaining person and hope to rescue them by sunset.
Michael Ebling, the top security official in Rhineland-Palatinate state, where Kroev is located, said the fact that so many people could be rescued “stands out in view of this event, the damage and the dimensions one can see with the naked eye”.
Among the first to be saved was a two-year-old child pulled out unharmed and the child’s mother, who was rescued with minor injuries. The child’s father was rescued later.
Mr Teusch said at a news conference: “We all had tears in our eyes and I still feel the same now. The whole story has a very emotional component, because when we arrived, when we looked at the building, it looked like we weren’t taking anyone out.”
He said the cause of the structural collapse has not yet been determined.
The original hotel building is believed to date back to the 17th century, but additional storeys were added around 1980, he said. He added that building work had taken place on Tuesday, but it was not clear whether there was any link between that and the collapse.
Regional public broadcaster SWR said that witnesses reported hearing a bang and seeing a large cloud of dust at the time of the collapse.
The rescue operation involved 250 emergency workers, including drone specialists, as well as rescue dogs.
Mr Teusch said: “There was no option (to use) stairs, house entrances, doors or windows, because they were simply no longer there.”
Authorities evacuated 21 people from three buildings immediately around the damaged hotel.
The hotel guests at the time of the collapse were largely German, apart from a Dutch family. Two Germans, a man and a woman, died in the collapse.
Kroev is on a picturesque section of the Mosel near the larger resort town of Traben-Trarbach. It has about 2,200 inhabitants.
