In the popular holiday city of Marseille on the Mediterranean, a building collapsed on Easter Vigil.
Emergency services are searching for survivors at high pressure.
Marseille – A residential building collapsed in the French city of Marseille during the Easter Vigil.
The emergency services are searching under high pressure for people under the rubble.
However, this is anything but easy, because a fire has broken out under the rubble and is making rescue work more difficult.
"We think there are between four and ten people under the rubble," said France's Interior Minister Geráld Darmanin on Sunday, assessing the situation in the Mediterranean port city.
According to initial investigations, at least five people were injured in a neighboring building.
To be on the safe side, the residents of around 30 surrounding residential buildings were evacuated.
Fire after building collapse in Marseille: "We don't know if they are alive or dead"
It is unclear exactly how many people are under the rubble of the four-storey house on Rue Tivoli.
"Four people appear to have been inside the building for sure," Darmanin said.
"We don't know if they are alive or dead." The reason for the collapse in the night was probably an explosion, and parts of the neighboring houses were also torn down.
"We cannot yet know today what caused this very large explosion," said the interior minister.
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Rescue workers work at the site of a collapsed building in the southern French port city of Marseille early Sunday morning.
© Nicolas Tucat/dpa
Fire after building collapse in Marseille: Are faced with "very rare phenomenon"
The fire that started shortly after the collapse was still burning Sunday afternoon.
"We are facing a very rare phenomenon - a fire that has been going on for several hours with extremely high temperatures," said Mayor Benoît Payan.
The use of water or foam should not prevent the buried victims from surviving.
Rescue dogs would also find it difficult to search for the buried people, it said.
The smell of burning and the high temperatures make the work difficult.
The four-legged friends have not found any human traces so far, said Payan.
But that means nothing.
"We cannot draw any conclusions from this at the moment." (kas/dpa)
Just last year, two houses collapsed in Lille, France.
After hours of searching, firefighters were able to recover a victim from under the rubble.
List of rubrics: © Nicolas Tucat/dpa
