Ten people were killed and around 20 more could be trapped under the rubble of a three-story residential building that collapsed before dawn Monday in western India, authorities said.
The accident occurred at around 3:40 a.m. (10:10 p.m. GMT Sunday) in Bhiwandi, a town near the country’s financial capital, Bombay.
“Ten people perished, we rescued 11 people,” an official from the municipality of Thane, who oversees Bhiwandi, told AFP.
Relief is made up of around 40 people, of whom 30 are from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF).
NDRF Director General Satya Narayan Pradhan said in a tweet that specialized teams assisted by detection dogs were looking for “20 to 25 people suspected of being stuck” in the rubble.
Images posted on the official NDRF Twitter account showed rescuers at work in the wreckage of the building.
The cause of the accident is unknown, but building collapses are relatively common in India between June and September, during the monsoon season, with heavy rainfall sometimes weakening structures.