Building collapse

Thanks to those of you who wrote/called about the building collapse in downtown Nairobi yesterday. Our office is about a kilometer from the site, but yesterday I was writing at home and didn't know about the collapse until my assistant, Eric, called about 2:30 p.m. -- not long after the building went down. So I and my regular photographer, Evelyn, were among the first foreign journalists to arrive.

 

Despite the limited scale of the accident, the scene was chaos. People were digging into the rubble with their bare hands. Emergency workers were yelling for the most basic supplies -- a hammer, a flashlight. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people had crammed the street to see what was going on, forcing police officers to switch to crowd control. Red Cross workers busied themselves forming human chains to keep people at bay so ambulances could get to the scene. It wasn't until Kenya's feared special police showed up, wearing their trademark red berets, that the crowd started to behave.

 

We'll probably hear stories of dramatic rescues over the next couple of days as people slowly are pulled out. But the initial disorganization of the rescue effort might have cost lives. Today, that's all anyone is talking about -- how unprepared the city seemed, for a relatively small-scale accident in central Nairobi.

 

The greater, though less surprising, tragedy is that the collapse is in all likelihood due to sloppy construction. The building -- a commercial complex in a busy business district -- had gone up in less than three months, with construction crews working day and night. One worker told us from his hospital bed, "We were constructing floor after floor even when the cement of the one beneath us had not dried to the required standard. That's why the building caved in."

 

Buildings go up so damn fast in this city, who knows how many construction codes are being violated, or whether there are any. In my neighborhood, cookie-cutter apartment blocks are sprouting like mushrooms, so quickly that the electricity grid can't handle it -- we had a dozen brief power cuts this weekend alone. Last month, when the earthquake hit in Congo, the only buildings where cracks appeared were those built in the past few years (the old, Soviet-style government buildings were sturdy). A few weeks ago, I noticed small cracks along the wall in my bedroom and living room -- and my apartment is barely more than a year old.