Three people die in a Seemapuri collapse that neighbours link to Tuesday's tremors

Three people died and eight were injured on Wednesday when a residential building collapsed in New Seemapuri, in north-east Delhi. PTI, citing officials, named the dead as Gulafsa, 21, who was about four months pregnant, a girl of about 12 whose identity was not yet fixed, and a child of about a year and a half, also not yet identified. Eleven people were pulled from the debris by evening. The eight injured were taken to Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital in Tahirpur.

The injured were identified as Momin Mirja, 56, Abdaan, 3, Abdul Rehman, 28, Devruddin, 28, Salma, 50, Chote, 34, Sakina, 35, and Samad, 30. Locals told reporters they could hear voices under the rubble while the search was still going. Delhi Fire Service, the National Disaster Response Force, police and civic teams worked the site.

A plot of 225 square feet, and two descriptions of the building

Police said the building stood on a plot of about 225 square feet and described it as four storeys. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi described a three-storey structure in a jhuggi-jhopri cluster, on about 22 square yards, in a Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board area near Idgah Machhli Mandi. The two descriptions do not match on height. They agree on the scale. This was a small plot with several floors of rooms, in a resettlement belt of Seemapuri, not a sanctioned tower.

The MCD said neighbours claimed cracks appeared after the earthquake in Uttarakhand on Tuesday evening, and that the owner was in the process of vacating the building. The National Centre for Seismology had recorded a magnitude 4.9 quake in Chamoli at about 10:24pm on Tuesday, at a depth near 13 kilometres, felt in the hills and in parts of Delhi. Officials said the actual cause of the collapse had not been fixed. A tremor is a lead, not a finding.

What the casualty list shows about who was inside

The names and ages on the hospital list are a household picture: a three-year-old, a pregnant woman of 21, a girl of 12, a toddler, and adults in their twenties, thirties and fifties. Eight of the injured are named. Two of the dead children are not. That gap is the identification work still open for the local police, and it is why early reports on Wednesday evening varied between one dead and three.

Seemapuri has a long record of extra floors on small plots. A collapse after a felt tremor raises a narrow engineering question: whether cracks reported by neighbours were new on Tuesday night, and whether anyone with authority told the occupants to leave. The MCD's account is that the owner was already trying to vacate. The deaths say the building was not empty when it came down.

The count the city is using

By late Wednesday the working toll was three dead and eight injured, with eleven rescued. The pregnant woman is named. The two children are not. The hospital is Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality in Tahirpur. The plot size on the police version is about 225 square feet. Until a structural report assigns a cause, the Chamoli quake remains the event neighbours and the civic body have both mentioned, and not yet a concluded reason for a building to fall.