Building Collapses

Part of a roof collapsed at a luxury condo-and-retail high-rise under construction in the Denver suburb of Greenwood Village, hospitalizing three workers. Ten more were seen at hospitals as a precaution. While workers were pouring concrete for the roof, a section of it collapsed onto the 12th and 13th floors, West Metro Fire spokesman Howard Hardy said. The cause was under investigation.

A violent storm lashed northern India, causing several buildings to collapse and leaving 27 people dead, officials said. Twenty-four people were killed in the town of Sultanpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh where several buildings were destroyed; three people were killed by lightning in the neighboring town of Pratapgarh, police said. "In a majority of the cases trees fell on the houses," said police spokesman Surendra Srivastava. "The people who were inside were crushed to death."

A powerful earthquake flattened a number of buildings today in western Indonesia, killing at least 10 people and packing hospitals with scores of injured, officials and media reports said. The magnitude 6.3 quake on the island of Sumatra was felt hundreds of miles away in Singapore, where some office buildings were evacuated, and in neighboring Malaysia. Some reports put the number of dead as high as 34, but those figures had not been confirmed officially.

A four-story boarding school collapsed in Tichakpura, a village in the western state of Gujarat, killing at least 11 girls and injuring 14, an official said. The principal said he had told state officials the school urgently needed repairs.

One worker was killed and two were injured when a building collapsed in Upper Manhattan. The three men were renovating the five-story building on West 113th Street when the top three floors collapsed. Of the two injured workers, one managed to free himself from the rubble; the other was rescued from the debris by firefighters. Both were in stable condition at a hospital.

Two San Clemente families were forced out of their hillside homes Friday as their backyards slid more than 35 feet down a canyon wall. Steven and Paula Cunningham woke shortly after 5 a.m. Thursday to the sound of cracking. They discovered that portions of the backyard had slipped about 8 feet. By Friday, as the sliding continued, the damage extended to a neighbor's yard and threatened to spread to even more properties, City Engineer Bill Cameron said.

Twenty people were killed and many were trapped when a four-story building collapsed in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, the International Committee of the Red Cross and residents said. "So far 50 people have been rescued alive and 20 confirmed dead," Red Cross officer Umar Mairiga said. The number of people trapped under the rubble was unclear because a restaurant, a bar and shops on the ground floor had customers when the building caved in, neighbors and the Red Cross said.

Inspectors began reviewing the city's entire highway system Wednesday -- every bridge, tunnel and roadway -- after at least 60 signs of loose bolts and other potential failures were found in the same Big Dig tunnel where a motorist was crushed by falling concrete. Initial inspections revealed that some bolts had started to come out of the concrete in the eastbound connector tunnel, part of the main route to Boston's Logan International Airport.

At least 12 tons of concrete fell from the ceiling of this city's Big Dig late Monday night, crushing a woman to death and fueling new questions about the safety of the $15-billion underground highway and tunnel system. The ceiling collapse in a connector section of Interstate 90 followed a winter in which one of the country's most ambitious urban infrastructure projects was plagued by falling debris, floods, leaking walls and concerns about construction methods in the transportation labyrinth.

A support frame collapsed at a high-rise construction project in Bal Harbour, killing three workers who became trapped in quick-drying concrete. The workers were on the 27th level of the building, pouring its concrete roof, when the supporting frame structure below them gave way, dropping them to the 26th floor, said Capt. Al Cruz of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. Despite efforts by co-workers to save the men, a 3-foot layer of hardening concrete encased one worker and partly buried the others.