MUMBAI: An extra floor and a room on the terrace — neither of which exists in the BMC's official records of Sayyed House — may have led to the collapse of the 72-year-old structure in the heart of old Mumbai.

The building, BMC city survey records show, is a ground-plus-four structure. But the structure, which stood at 250 Nagdevi Road near Crawford Market, was a ground-plus-five affair along with another room on the terrace. Senior BMC officials said this might have put extra load on the building, leading to the crash.

The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority proposed repairs for the building in 1992 and those documents, too, said the building was a ground-plus-four structure, officials added. "We will probe how the additional floor, plus another room on the terrace, came up in a totally unauthorised manner," a senior BMC official said on Wednesday.

If what these preliminary BMC findings are true, Wednesday's collapse has followed the script of many of the other building crashes in Mumbai in the recent past. One of the most recent examples is Laxmi Chhaya, a Borivli (West) building, that collapsed on 18 July 2007 and killed 30 people. Investigations then revealed that a shopowner on the ground floor had made extensive structural changes, affecting the stability of the building. "Making internal or external alterations can sound the death-knell of even new constructions," a BMC engineer explained.

Speculation about the reasons for Sayyed House's collapse started minutes after the structure came crashing down. Residents of the building who survived as well as those of many other neighbouring buildings blamed a construction on a next-door plot — merely five feet away — for Wednesday's crash. Redevelopment work on the neighbouring building started a year ago and it was causing a lot of problems for the 72-year-old Sayyed House, they alleged. Several complaints to the BMC had gone unheeded, they added. "We have written to the BMC several times and told officials how we could feel tremors caused by this new construction. But not one official even came to the site to pay a visit," Farhan Sayyed, a cousin of the Sayyed brothers who died, said. Farhan lives in Sayyed House's front portion, which survived the collapse.

Seventy-year-old Sakhi Hasan, owner of a safety items shop in the neighbouring Masjid building, also alleged several complaints were made to the BMC. "We could feel our building shake when work was going on. We complained to the civic officials but didn't get any response," he said.

But Rubbberwala Developers, which took up the redevelopment project four years ago, rubbished the allegations. "We finished our foundation work three months ago. It is a mere coincidence that our project is going on on a plot next door to Sayyed House, Rubberwala Developers director Tabrez Shaikh said. "The people who are now complaining had, in fact, approached us to take up the redevelopment of their building. But the top two floors were unauthorised and we did not agree to redevelop the building. It is obvious that a building will become structurally weak if two floors are added without strengthening the foundation," he added.

Mhada's Mumbai Board of Repairs and Reconstruction (MBRR) deputy chief engineer (south), Balbir Sehgal, said: "All the buildings in this area are very old and in a bad condition. We will conduct a survey and see that they go for redevelopment."

Copyright © 2008 Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd.