Residents rush out as wall comes tumbling down onto apartment building

Residents from 29 apartments were quickly forced out of their homes in the Ipiranga district, São Paulo, in the early hours of Wednesday (Dec 24) by a retaining wall which came tumbling down onto the building. Seven cars parked in the area were buried, and a column was hit at first floor level. Dirt and debris broke into one of the apartments.

Entry to nine apartments and nine surrounding houses has been blocked. Civil Defence agents are still at the scene, where they announced that 20 other apartments from the same complex are being monitored and residents should be allowed back in later today.

Later that morning, the agents allowed locals to enter one by one and pick up their belongings. Among the residents is José Francisco Marques dos Santos, who lives in the building with his wife and two children, aged 8 and 12. “I was by the window at around 2:40 when I heard a really loud crackling sound. My son was having a stomach ache, so I stood up to give him a medicine. I asked my wife: “what's this noise?”, and we just couldn't tell. I looked out of the window to see what it was. That's when the wall collapsed and hit the apartment below,” he says, adding that, “If there were anyone lying in bed [there], they would have died.”

Santos then started to knock on his neighbors' doors, urging them to leave the building.

Kelly Oliveira is one of Santos's neighbors. Along with her mother and two children, she left the place with nothing but the clothes they had on, when they heard the noise and saw through the window that the wall had come down onto nearby cars, which caused a strong gas smell to arise. In tears, she declared: “Christmas is over. There's no Christmas. There's nothing. You work for 15 years to afford a house and then you see this happen. It's tough.”

Kelly Oliveira told Agência Brasil that the houses were built irregularly. “Some of the houses built were attached to the retaining wall. I phoned [the local authorities] to report that, and they've never sent an inspector, or someone to have a look. It's outrageous,” she revealed.

Up to the beginning of this afternoon, local authorities had not made any comments about Kelly Oliveira's report.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira