Torrential rain in India has caused a five-storey apartment building to collapse in Mumbai, killing 19 people and possibly burying more than a dozen others, police said.
Rescuers, residents and police officers managed to pull 30 injured people from the rubble, but more than a dozen were missing and feared trapped.
The building was one of thousands in Mumbai that are more than 100 years old, with foundations that have been weakened by years of heavy monsoon rains.
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Last month, another four-storey building toppled in the city’s suburb of Ghatkopar, killing 17.
Thursday’s tragedy occurred in a congested area of Mumbai’s southern Bhendi Bazaar area, following the city’s heaviest rainfall in 15 years.
Authorities were advising people living in an adjacent building to vacate after it developed cracks following Thursday’s early morning collapse.
It was not immediately clear how many people might be trapped in the toppled building. The building had housed nine families in apartments above a first-floor nursery school, but the collapse occurred before the toddlers had arrived for the day, police said.
Hours later, rescuers used earth-moving machines to lift concrete slabs and cement blocks as they searched for survivors.
Building collapses are common in India during the monsoon season, which is June to September.
High demand and lax regulations encourage some builders to use substandard materials or add unauthorised extra floors.
Every year Mumbai struggles to cope with the annual monsoon deluge, drawing criticism about its poor planning.
Deforestation, which allows water to stream downhill rather than being slowed down by trees, also contributes to the severe floods.
Since the start of the season, devastating floods across South Asia have killed at least 1,000 people and affected close to 40 million across northern India, southern Nepal and northern Bangladesh.
The rains have led to wide-scale flooding in a broad arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills in the three countries, causing landslides, damaging roads and electric towers and washing away tens of thousands of homes and vast swathes of farmland.
India has a plan to alleviate its regular floods by linking large rivers across the country via a network of 30 mega-canals, effectively creating the world’s longest river. However, the plan may cause a host of new problems, and rainfall patterns may change anyway as a result of climate change.