Three of a family die in house collapse

Three of a family die in house collapse Staff Reporter Saturday, 21 Feb, 2009 01:54 PM PST The major portion of the roof collapsed under the weight of the construction material. –White Star/Fahim Siddiqi
KARACHI: Two women and a young girl of the same family were crushed to death while a fourth girl suffered serious injuries when the roof of their under-construction house in Defence View collapsed on Friday evening.
At the time of the incident, no male member of the family was in the house.
According to the area residents, the family of Dr Ghulam Rasool had recently returned from the interior of Sindh after attending a family funeral.
The family was living in one or two rooms of the house in Defence View, Phase III, while the rest of the structure was being rebuilt.
A visit to the scene of the incident showed that in actuality two roofs had collapsed, which caused the instant deaths of the three female members of the family.
A neighbour told Dawn that on Friday afternoon labourers, who were engaged in the construction work, had shifted sand and gravel dumped on the road to the roof of the house.
It was shortly after this that the roof collapsed, falling on the roof of the first floor, which also caved in and fell on the family, who were in the ground floor room of the house at the time.
Viewing the house from the front it was difficult to imagine that an incident of such magnitude had occurred, as the roof had caved in.
‘If the family members had been sitting in some other room at the time of the incident, they would have survived,’ a rescue worker said.
A view from the roof of the neighbouring house substantiated his observation.
Shortly after the incident, the rescue services arrived at the scene and recovered the bodies from the rubble.
The three female members of the family, including a two-year-old girl, Laiba, her mother, Mehreen, 30, and Mehreen’s mother-in-law, Fatah Khatoon, 50, died on the spot.
The injured girl, whose name could not be ascertained till our going to press, was admitted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre. Police said that it was the sheer weight of the two roofs, along with the weight of the construction material, which caused the instant deaths.
Till the filing of this story the police had not filed a report about the incident. A duty officer of the Baloch Colony police station said they were waiting for the family to file a complaint.