At least three people were killed Thursday when a building under construction collapsed in Degakon, a bustling area in Benin’s economic hub of Cotonou, local authorities said.

Residents said the collapse happened early in the morning as workers were pouring the concrete of the third floor of the four-story building.

“This is a building site and as you now see we are looking for people still in the rubble,” Arlette Saizonou, a local mayor, told AFP.
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“We already have three dead bodies out of the rubble and two wounded,” she added.

Building collapses happen frequently in West Africa where poor workmanship and materials coupled with a lack of official oversight often result in accidents.

One of the most notorious collapses in the region happened in 2014, when a building owned by Nigerian pastor TB Joshua collapsed and killed more than one hundred people, most of them South Africans.

A Nigerian coroner found that the six-story guesthouse had more floors than the foundation could hold, but the pastor said a mysterious “hovering” aircraft seen over the building before the collapse was to blame for the accident.