Tehran building fire: Hopes fading for trapped Iran firefighters

Iranian officials said Friday they were losing hope of pulling any survivors from the rubble of a collapsed Tehran high-rise where around 20 firefighters are feared to have lost their lives. Rescue workers, soldiers and sniffer dogs were still frantically searching through the wreckage of the 15-storey Plasco building in downtown Tehran, which collapsed on Thursday after a four-hour blaze. But smouldering fires and smoke were complicating the search, and so far no survivors or bodies had been found. “It is very unlikely that we will pull anyone out alive from the rubble,” the head of Tehran’s crisis management centre, Esmail Najjar, told the ISNA news agency. “Our goal is to recover the bodies of these martyrs without causing any damage to the bodies,” he added. [caption id=“attachment_3213032” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Iranian firefighters start to dig a tunnel to make a corridor under the 17-storey Plasco building which collapsed after being engulfed by a fire, in central Tehran, Iran, Thursday. AP[/caption] The Plasco building was Iran’s oldest high-rise and contained a shopping centre and hundreds of clothing suppliers. “The removal of debris is more difficult than removing debris from a major earthquake because we are dealing with fire, smoke and lack of oxygen,” said Red Crescent official Morteza Moradipour. “It is still not clear how many people are trapped under the rubble and not even one person has been pulled out,” added Tehran emergency services director Pir Hossein Koolivand. Praise and mourning Iranians were in shock over the apparent loss of so many firefighters. State television placed a black banner across the corner of the screen as a sign of mourning, and social media were full of messages of praise and condolence for the emergency services. “If the firefighters had not been there in time, if they had not searched inside to evacuate people, we would have had hundreds under the rubble instead of 20 firefighters,” said brigade spokesman Jalal Maleki. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the incident had “caused deep sorrow, regret and concern for me,” and praised the “bravery and sacrifice of the firefighters.” IRNA said 84 people were injured in the initial fire, of whom five were still in hospital. One firefighter, who escaped the building before it collapsed, died in hospital on Friday from severe burns, it added. The head of Iran’s chamber of commerce, Ali Fazeli, said an initial estimate of 15,000 billion rials (roughly $500 million) had been put on the financial damage. “Unfortunately, a considerable number of shops in this building were not insured,” he added. The clothing suppliers were particularly full of stock in the run-up to Nowruz, the Iranian new year, which falls in March. Tehran police chief Ghader Karimi said rescue workers were pulling safes and other items out of the rubble, and these were being kept in a special store at the site to return to owners. President Hassan Rouhani has called for an immediate investigation, with city officials saying the building’s managers ignored repeated warnings about fire hazards. The Plasco building was Tehran’s first shopping centre and Iran’s tallest building when it was finished in 1962, before being dwarfed by the construction boom of later years. It was built by Habibollah Elghanian, a prominent Iranian-Jewish businessman who was arrested for alleged ties to Israel and sentenced to death and executed after the 1979 Islamic revolution.