“While we were eating suhoor, we were surprised by the building running towards us from windows and balconies, so terrified that we left our building immediately,” said one of the tenants of the building opposite the leaning building in Alexandria’s Azarita neighbourhood.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Alexandria witnessed something unusual, when a 13-floor building in the Azarita neighbourhood started to lean towards a building on the opposite side. The building and all in the vicinity were also evacuated without any loss of human lives.
The nearby buildings estimated at 30. The authorities forced those buildings’ tenants to leave and were relocated until handling the crisis.
The authorities on Saturday were able to start removing the upper floors of the building, and the removing process is still ongoing.
From his part, Governor of Alexandria Mohamed Sultan said that 48 housing units have been provided in the El Amiriya cooperative housing project as a permanent shelter to those affected by the leaning building.
Heba Mohamed, one of the tenants of the leaning building, told Daily News Egypt that the shelters they were moved to are not suitable for living.
Mohamed noted that the authorities divided the tenants of the building, gathering the men in one place and the women in another, not paying any attention to family bonds.
“The new shelters are very far away and as of now we don’t know the mechanism of housing in the new shelters, whether it is ownership or rent,” she added.
Public opinion was divided into two camps, one mocking the incident and joking on social media and the other denouncing the government’s negligence in monitoring the construction of buildings, expressing their sympathy to the families who were displaced without shelter.
Building collapses are common in Alexandria and in Egypt in general and are usually attributed to violations of building specifications, illegal extensions, and a lack of monitoring.
