A three-story building collapsed into an open excavation site in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on Wednesday afternoon, killing at least one person and injuring 12, six of them critically. The pit sat next door at a development that city records show had already been caught doing work it was ordered to stop.
The first 911 call came in at 4:01 p.m. The building, near the corner of Flatbush and Bedford avenues, had a business on the ground floor and apartments above. When it fell, the wall of the building beside it was sheared off, leaving apartments open to the street. Firefighters spent the evening digging through the rubble by hand and with search dogs. They pulled out at least two people on stretchers.
One of the rescued was a pregnant woman. “She is alive,” her husband told News 12 Brooklyn. The Red Cross and the city’s Office of Emergency Management opened a reception center for displaced residents at the Flatbush YMCA.
Flatbush has long been the center of Brooklyn’s Caribbean and Black life, and the people who rent in buildings like this one are the neighbors of whatever gets built beside them. As of Wednesday night, officials had not released the names of the dead or the injured, and no cause had been determined.
What the city’s records show
The collapsed building stood at the edge of a site where a one-story building had been demolished for a planned nine-story project, with a grocery store and a medical center on the ground floor and apartments above, ABC News reported. Department of Buildings records show the site received a violation in April for unlawfully continuing work while under a stop-work order. Records also show the department noted problems at the project in May, including a lack of overhead protection for neighboring properties and work that did not match the approved drawings. According to those records, the demolition contractor paid $10,000 in penalties in October to resolve the April violation.
That sequence does not establish why the building fell. The Department of Buildings said its inspectors were at the scene assisting recovery and checking the stability of nearby buildings, and the agency is investigating. Inquiries to the property owner, the architect and the general contractor had not been answered at the time of reporting.
It does establish what the city already knew. A contractor that kept working through a full stop-work order was fined $10,000, and the work went on next to people’s homes. For a developer building a nine-story project, that is a rounding error.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked New Yorkers to “please join me in holding our neighbors and the members of this community in our hearts.” Council Member Farah Louis, who represents the area, said she was in direct communication with Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore and that her office was working to reach affected families.
Comfort is not what the families of Flatbush are owed. They are owed the full inspection history of this site, a public account of who approved the work and when, and a penalty schedule that costs a developer more than it saves. The Department of Buildings should publish both before anyone is told this was a surprise.
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