Three people are missing after a house collapsed in Görlitz, eastern Germany.
05/19/2026, 07:1605/19/2026, 07:16
Two of the original five missing people showed up shortly after midnight and were fine, a police spokeswoman said.
An explosion may have caused the house to collapse.Image: screenshot x
The Wilhelminian style house collapsed early on Monday evening. The police spokeswoman said they were still looking for three people who could not be reached. It could be that they were in the house at the time of the collapse.
The police wrote on platform X that there may have been a gas explosion in the apartment building. However, it has not yet been conclusively clarified why the building collapsed. During the night, the spokeswoman said that there was a leak from which gas was escaping.
For this reason, the emergency services at the scene of the accident had to act very carefully, she reported. After the emergency services tried to find those buried with the help of sniffer dogs in the evening, they began to carefully remove the rubble around 2 a.m. – both with an excavator and by hand, as the spokeswoman reported in the early hours of the morning. The helpers gave everything, she said.
A man who feared his wife and cousin might be under the rubble said he heard an explosion while shopping at a nearby supermarket.
Large area of accident site evacuated
After the building collapsed not far from Görlitz train station, the accident site was initially evacuated and cordoned off. Then the search for dead or injured people began. Police, fire brigade and civil protection were at the scene of the accident. According to the police, there were rental and holiday apartments in the collapsed house.
Görlitz is the easternmost city in Germany, it is located in Upper Lusatia in Saxony directly on the Neisse and has 57,000 inhabitants. (sda/apa/dpa)