Philippine hotel collapse death toll rises to four as search continues for 17 missing

# Philippine hotel collapse death toll rises to four as search continues for 17 missing

NeoTechNews Desk

Rescue crews in Angeles City, Philippines were still searching through a huge pile of concrete and twisted metal on May 25, 2026 after a nine-story hotel under construction collapsed before dawn. The latest AP report said the death toll had risen to four and that 17 people remained missing, most of them construction workers.

The collapse happened in Angeles City in Pampanga Province, north of Manila, and left a scene that rescuers described as dangerous and unstable. AP said firefighters and police spent hours trying to extricate people trapped under slabs of concrete and tangled scaffolding. Two of the men pulled out on Monday were dead, while a third was taken to an ambulance but later died despite efforts to revive him.

The report also said one of the three people removed from the rubble was not on the list of the missing, indicating how chaotic the headcounts had become after the collapse. A Malaysian tourist was the fourth fatality, trapped in a budget inn that was partly hit by falling debris from the hotel site. Another guest was injured but managed to get out.

Authorities did not say the cause was known. The collapse came after a fierce thunderstorm and AP said the national police would support an investigation into possible safety and building code violations. That inquiry matters because the building was still under construction and the casualty list was concentrated among workers who were sleeping on the ground floor on pieces of plywood when the structure failed.

Families of the missing waited nearby as the rescue work continued. Angeles City Mayor Carmelo Lazatin said he still hoped more people could be saved and did not want to shift immediately to a body-retrieval operation. That caution reflected the difficult conditions at the site, where huge slabs of concrete remained precariously balanced on scaffolding and could still fall on rescuers.

The AP report said 26 workers were either rescued or managed to run out after the collapse. Even that number suggests how close some people were to escape and how quickly the building failure unfolded. The city’s information chief said 17 were still missing, which means the full death toll could still change if more victims are found.

The collapse also brought into view the local economy around Clark, a former U.S. air base that helped turn Angeles into a commercial and tourism hub. But on this day, the city was defined not by growth but by loss, search operations and the difficult uncertainty that follows when a building comes down in seconds.