At least three workers were killed and another was critically injured in an accident at a construction site in Hamburg’s HafenCity. They fell from scaffolding, a fire department spokesman told the German Press Agency on Monday morning. This fell into a shaft. According to the spokesman, the scaffolding belonged to an elevator shaft around eight floors high. The scaffolding may have collapsed.
The Hamburg fire department corrected the number of deaths downwards at midday. “We know (…) of three deaths that we can see as certain in this confusion,” said a fire department spokesman on Monday afternoon. Initially there was talk of five deaths.
The accident occurred at a construction site for the Überseequartier. The fire department was alerted shortly after 9 a.m. The media had previously reported on the accident.
At least one other construction worker is still missing, said the fire department spokesman. The construction site was evacuated. Several hundred workers stood outside the area. Emergency chaplains have been called in to look after the emergency services and eyewitnesses. A crisis intervention team is also on duty, said a fire department spokesman.
According to the fire department, the rescue work will take several hours. “We have three floors here where we have to push debris aside and secure it,” said the fire department spokesman. A total of around 150 firefighters are on duty.
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 in HafenCity. 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.
Just on September 2nd, four workers were injured, some of them life-threatening, in a similar accident at a construction site on Hamburg’s Elbbrücken – 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.
Note: This article is continually updated. The number of deaths and missing persons has been corrected according to the latest information from the fire department.
