At least 14 people dead after massive billboard collapses in India

At least 14 people were killed when a billboard in Mumbai, the financial center of India, collapsed.

In the last hours of the search for survivors, rescue teams utilized excavators to remove twisted metal wreckage.

Over 100 people were trapped when a gasoline station, houses, and cars were crushed by a billboard larger than an Olympic-sized swimming pool on Monday during a thunderstorm, according to officials.

Rescuers in the Ghatkopar district of Mumbai toiled through the night to extricate individuals from the rubble on the side of a bustling main thoroughfare.

Some 75 wounded were rescued and 14 bodies were found, the city’s civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, said.

The towering billboard billowing in the wind collapsed as a dust storm and rain lashed the city, bringing traffic to a standstill and disrupting flights at Mumbai airport

The agency owning the billboard did not have a permit from the BMC, the municipal body said in a statement.

The hoarding measured about 1,338 square metres (14,400 square feet), it said, nine times more than the maximum permitted size.

The BMC said it had instructed the agency to remove all its hoardings immediately.

“To prevent such accidents from happening again, instructions have been given to conduct a structural audit of all hoardings in Mumbai and immediately take down dangerous ones,” Eknath Shinde, the chief minister of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said in a post on X.

“Out of 1,300 such hoardings in Mumbai, around 30 have not submitted a structural stability report that is mandatory every two years,” said Bhushan Gagrani, who heads the BMC.