Rescuers searched for two people feared trapped under the rubble of a collapsed archive building in the German city of Cologne yesterday and tried to save documents worth hundreds of millions of euro.
The multistorey building containing thousands of historical records collapsed on Tuesday, injuring at least one person.
Officials said two men living in the building next to the archive were missing, adding that several other people who had been reported missing had now been accounted for.
The reason for the collapse of the 1970s building was unknown, officials said, but Cologne’s mayor, Fritz Schramma, suggested work on an underground train line near the building would be examined closely.
“[The question is] whether you can remove such chunks of earth beneath a city as big, as inhabited and as busy as Cologne has been for 2,000 years,” he said as he visited the site of the collapse.
The head of Cologne’s cultural department, Georg Quander, said the collapse was threatening documents representing 1,000 years of history with an insurance value of €400 million.
The historical town archive was one of the biggest of its kind in Germany and contained many documents belonging to the late Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll.
“As disastrous as this is, we’re grateful that all staff, guests and readers were able to get out,” Mr Quander said.
The cultural loss linked to the collapse, he said, risked being larger than that caused by a fire at the Anna-Amalia library in Weimar in 2004 which destroyed thousands of books. – (Reuters)