Lucky escape as Borivli building tilts

Two days after the Mahim building collapse incident, around 45 families of Raj Apartments in Borivli’s Yoginagar area had a lucky escape on Wednesday.

Residents of the five-storey building found out in the morning that pillars on the ground floor had developed cracks and the structure had tilted on one side.

The 33-year-old building, which has three wings, houses 60 families. “A chunk of concrete peeled off from the wall as my sister, who was on her way to college, tried to push aside the shoe rack. This made me think that something was wrong,” said Akshay Surve, a ground floor resident of the building’s ‘B’ wing.

Surve added that he and his parents came out to find that pillars of neighbouring flats and of an adjacent wing of the building had developed cracks in the wee hours of Wednesday.

“My dad quickly alerted the police,” he said.

Subsequently, officials from the police, fire brigade and civic body reached the spot and vacated the building.

“We have declared the entire building unsafe and have suggested to the society office-bearers to pull down the structure,” said assistant municipal commissioner V Bole, adding that the building was not in the list of dilapidated buildings.

The residents said that the entire building is going up for redevelopment after the monsoon. “We had planned to vacate the building in two months since we recently finalised a redevelopment deal with a developer,” said Bhavesh Khimani, a resident of the ‘A’ wing.

Khimani added that some of the residents have already vacated their flats. “We had a tiff with another developer over redevelopment and moved court against him. The Supreme Court ruled in the society’s favour,” said Khimani.

Chairman of the society, Sanjay Dalvi, said that most of the families have been provided flats by the developer while some have sought shelter at relatives’ homes and others at a hall where the local corporator has made temporary arrangements.

“We carried out a structural audit of the building today [Wednesday] and the engineer has suggested that wooden support be used to prop up each floor so that people get into their homes to retrieve belongings,”said Dalvi, adding that the audit report has been submitted to the police and will be handed over to the civic body on Thursday.