Gas explosion suspected Three people are still missing after house collapse in Germany
After the collapse of a Wilhelminian-style house in Görlitz, emergency services are still searching - sometimes with their bare hands - for possible victims. According to the police, a gas explosion may have caused the disaster.
19.05.2026, 05:43
19.05.2026, 05:59
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- An apartment building has collapsed in the center of the eastern German city of Görlitz.
- According to the police, three people are currently missing.
- Two of the original five missing people turned up shortly after midnight.
- The police suspect that there may have been a gas explosion in the apartment building.
- However, it has not yet been possible to conclusively determine why the building collapsed.
Three people are missing following the collapse of a house in Görlitz in eastern Germany. Two of the original five missing people were found shortly after midnight and are doing well, according to a police spokeswoman.
The Wilhelminian-style house collapsed early Monday evening. The police spokeswoman went on to say that they were still looking for three people who could not be reached. It is possible that they were in the house at the time of the collapse.
The police wrote on Platform X that there may have been a gas explosion in the apartment building. So far, however, it has not been possible to conclusively clarify why the building collapsed. During the night, the spokeswoman said that there was a leak from which gas was escaping.
Debris is also being removed by hand
For this reason, the emergency services had to proceed very carefully at the scene of the accident, she reported. After the emergency services attempted to find the buried victims with the help of sniffer dogs in the evening, they began to carefully remove the rubble at around 2 a.m. - both with an excavator and by hand, as the spokeswoman reported in the early hours of the morning. The helpers were giving their all, she said.
One man, who feared that his wife and cousin might be under the rubble, said that he had heard an explosion while shopping in a nearby supermarket.
Large-scale evacuation of the accident site
After the collapse of the building not far from Görlitz station, the scene of the accident was initially evacuated and cordoned off over a wide area. The search for the dead and injured then began. The police, fire department and civil protection were at the scene of the accident. According to the police, the collapsed house contained rental and vacation apartments.
Görlitz is the easternmost city in Germany, located in Saxony's Upper Lusatia region directly on the Neisse river and has a population of 57,000.
