Part of century old building in city collapses

A large part of a century-old abandoned building at Armanitola in the capital fell apart yesterday morning. The building once used to house a girls school.Photo: STAR

A large part of a hundred-year-old building at Armanitola in old Dhaka collapsed yesterday morning.
However, nobody was injured in the incident.
According to eyewitness, bricks and plasters began to drop from the middle part of the two-storey building around 7:00am and the entire middle section collapsed within thirty minutes.
The standing portion of the building is also on the brink of collapse.
Rashida Begum, a resident of a room of the intact part of the building on the ground floor, told The Daily Star, she was sleeping and the noise of falling bricks from one of the walls of her room woke her up.
"I rushed outside with my children," she said adding that she also called out eight labourers who were sleeping in a room of the collapsed part of the building.
As soon as the labourers got out of the building the middle part collapsed, she said.
Hundreds of people gathered and witnessed the collapse.
The building was used by the New Government Girls High School until 1985 when they abandoned it.
The school Headmistress Anzuara Anisa filed a general diary (GD) with Kotwali Police Station in this regard.
Locals said the building was a hundred years old. Pakistan Urdu School used the building from 1948. After the Liberation War the name was changed to New Government Girls High School in 1973.
Following massive casualties in the roof collapse of a building of Jagannath Hall at Dhaka University in 1985, the school moved to nearby Armanitola Boys High School the next day abandoning the building.
Anzuara told The Daily Star that outsiders grabbed the building along with the land of the school campus. There is a case regarding the ownership of the land pending with the High Court, she added.