A newly opened shopping mall on Mexico City’s south side on Thursday partly collapsed after structural problems led the mall’s operators to quickly evacuate the area. No injuries were reported.
Officials said a support beam failed in a cantilevered office area on the top floors that stuck out from the main mall building.
Restaurant worker Juan Ramon Hernandez said people in the mall were evacuated only about five minutes before the offices sheared off.
Photo: Bloomberg
“We heard a big noise and they began to evacuate us from the plaza,” Hernandez said. “About five minutes later was when the collapse happened.”
Videos posted on social media showed the multistory section collapse in a cloud of dust and twisted metal. Some of it fell into lanes of a major freeway, which had been closed shortly before the collapse.
The Artz Pedregal mall opened in March, although parts remain under construction.
It had drawn the ire of neighbors worried about the loss of open space, congestion and other issues. Built on the edge of the city’s main expressway, the mall had suffered previous subsoil slides.
The collapse occurred in an area of offices and experts are investigating whether the collapse of the cantilevered area was due to structural defects or soil settling, Mexico City Mayor Jose Ramon Amieva said.
“They noticed that a separation was occurring” between the overhang and the rest of the building hours before the failure, Amieva said.
Calling it a “case of negligence,” the mayor said that the mall’s construction permits and other authorizations should be reviewed as investigators try to find out what happened.
In a statement, the mall’s operator said it notified city authorities when it noticed signs the area was collapsing.
It said it regretted the effects the accident was having on traffic on the notoriously crowded Periferico expressway. At least two lanes were closed.
The mall was controversial in part because it threatened to clog traffic and because it was built near a rain catchment basin that serves to regulate the city’s seasonally heavy rainfall.
The risk posed by substandard building has been a long-standing issue in Mexico City, where many poorly built or designed buildings collapsed in the city’s earthquakes in 1985 and last year.
The city also has notoriously bad subsoil conditions and developers often build on unstable land.
In 2016, while foundation work was still being done on the mall, a retaining wall next to the expressway partly collapsed.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion