BERLIN (AP) — Part of a hotel in a wine town on the Moselle in the west Germany collapsed, authorities said. Two people died and seven others were trapped in the rubble overnight. The last person was rescued about 24 hours later, on Wednesday evening.
14 people were in the hotel in Kroev when a floor of the building collapsed on Tuesday at around 11 p.m. According to police, five people were able to leave the building unharmed because they were not in the collapsing part, but others were trapped.
Some of them were able to reach the rescue team by cell phone. But getting to them was difficult because the collapse of a floor meant that two ceilings were lying on top of each other, says Jörg Teusch, fire and disaster protection inspector for the Bernkastel-Wittlich district.
“We have to proceed with caution because the entire building structure is like a house of cards. If we draw the wrong card, the building will surely collapse,” he said as rescue workers sifted through the rubble on Wednesday morning.
A woman who was among the seven trapped people was the last to be rescued on Wednesday evening, police said.
Michael Ebling, the top security official in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, where Kroev is based, said the fact that so many people were rescued “is remarkable given this event, the damage and the dimensions visible to the naked eye.”
Among the first to be rescued was a two-year-old child who was pulled out unharmed, and the child’s mother who was rescued with minor injuries. The child’s father was rescued later.
“We all had tears in our eyes and I still feel the same way today. The whole story has a very emotional component because when we arrived and looked at the building, it looked like we were not going to get anyone out,” Teusch said at a press conference.
Teusch said the cause of the building collapse had yet to be determined.
The original hotel building is believed to date back to the 17th century, but additional floors were added around 1980, he said. He added that work was being carried out on the building on Tuesday, but it was not clear whether there was a connection between that work and the collapse.
Regional public broadcaster SWR said witnesses reported hearing a bang and seeing a large cloud of dust at the time of the collapse.
250 rescue workers, including drone specialists and rescue dogs, were involved in the rescue operation.
“There was no way to use stairs, house entrances, doors or windows because they were simply no longer there,” said Teusch.
Authorities also evacuated 21 people from three buildings in the immediate vicinity of the damaged hotel. The hotel guests at the time of the collapse were mostly German, apart from a Dutch family.
Two Germans, a man and a woman, died. Rescue workers were able to recover one of the bodies, but police said they would have to clear part of the building on Thursday to recover the other body.
Kröv is located on a picturesque stretch of the Moselle near the larger holiday resort of Traben-Trarbach. It has about 2,200 inhabitants.
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Associated Press writer Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report.
