People are feared to be trapped after a 21-storey building collapsed in Lagos, Nigeria on Monday.
The building, located in the city’s affluent Ikoyi neighborhood, is a construction site for luxury apartments. It is unclear how many people were in the building when it fell.
“I thought it was an earthquake when I rushed out of my apartment just after 3 p.m. I felt the building move and knew something was wrong,” Olu Apata, a nearby resident and the president of the Nigerian Bar Association, told CNN.
Apata said the building site has been under construction for the past two years and that the developer was at the site meeting with prospective buyers earlier on Monday.
Videos and photos shared on social media showed people surveying the scene of the collapse, where slabs of concrete were piled high in a heap of rubble.
Building collapses are a relatively common occurrence in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city with a population of around 20 million people.
In 2019, the collapse of two separate buildings, including one housing a school, left dozens of people dead.
An expert told CNN at the time that more than 1,000 buildings were at risk of collapsing in Lagos, which has a population of around 20 million.
(CNN)
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