Several workers died when scaffolding collapsed in Hamburg’s HafenCity.
A fire brigade spokesman said that scaffolding had fallen into an internal elevator shaft – and several other workers were still missing under the rubble. The number of confirmed deaths was still unclear at midday: “We know (…) of three deaths that we can safely see in this confusion,” said a fire department spokesman.
The fire department initially spoke of five deaths.
The accident occurred at a construction site for the Überseequartier. The scaffolding is said to have been eight floors above the basement.
Altitude rescuers in action
According to the fire department, 70 rescue workers are on duty, including height rescuers and a technical platoon from the volunteer fire department. The rescue work is therefore difficult.
The debris from the fallen scaffolding is piled up from the basement to the second floor of the elevator shaft. According to the fire department spokesman, rescuing the construction workers who are still missing is correspondingly complicated. “The difficulty, of course, is that we have a lot of scaffolding parts here that need to be secured and we first have to work our way down to the deployment site, floor by floor.”
The construction site was cleared. A construction manager said 1,300 to 1,500 people worked there. Several hundred construction workers stood on the street.
Emergency pastors were called in to look after the emergency services and eyewitnesses. A crisis intervention team is also on duty, said the fire department spokesman.
The Überseequartier is part of the Hafencity, which is considered Europe’s largest inner-city urban development project. The project directly on the Elbe was initiated in the early 1990s by then mayor Henning Voscherau (SPD) and, according to HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, covers an area of around 157 hectares. The Überseequartier is considered to be the most metropolitan and at the same time the most popular district.
Shops, restaurants, entertainment, offices, a cruise terminal, an underground bus station, hotels with around 1,150 rooms and more than 1,000 apartments will be built on the 14 hectare site. The northern part has been completed since 2019, and work is ongoing in the southern part.
The real estate company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is reportedly investing more than one billion euros in the total above-ground gross floor area of around 260,000 square meters.
Not the first serious construction accident this year
Just on September 2nd, four workers were injured, some of them life-threatening, in a similar accident at a construction site on Hamburg’s Elbe bridges – not far from HafenCity. A scaffolding collapsed and dragged the workers down about five meters, a police spokesman said. The men fell from a height of around five meters.
Three construction workers aged 27, 35 and 53 were seriously injured. A 21-year-old suffered life-threatening injuries. The construction workers are said to have been busy dismantling scaffolding on the railway bridge. Since the tide was low at the time of the accident and there was no water in the river, the construction workers fell on the rocky riverbed.
On April 6, 2020, two construction workers were seriously injured by falling components at a construction site on Zweibrückenstrasse in HafenCity. A package of 20 to 30 formwork boards that were being moved by a crane were torn off the hook, said a fire department spokesman. They buried a construction worker and hit another in the side, seriously injuring him.
