Firefighters used a robot dog to inspect the rubble of a fatal garage collapse, it has emerged.
At least one person died and five others were injured in the incident in Lower Manhattan, New York, US.
Officials said the structure collapsed in Lower Manhattan's Financial District, with bystander footage showing cars precariously hanging from a buckled upper deck on Tuesday, April 18.
An FDNY-branded "robot dog" was seen entering the garage between Ann Street and Nassau Street along with flying drones.
In a press conference, New York Fire Chief of Operation John Esposito said they believed it was an "active parking lot" and were not "aware there was any construction ongoing".
FDNY Chief of Operations John Hodgens confirmed one person was pronounced dead on the scene.
Chief Hodgens said: “We believe that we have everybody accounted for.”
He explained that due to structural instability, firefighters were using drone and robot units with streaming video to search the garage for survivors.
He added: “We’ve used the dog before, this is the first time we’ve been able to fly inside a collapse.”In a statement, he said: "As far as we can tell so far we have six patients.
"There were six workers in the building at the time of the collapse. Four of them have been transported to the hospital in stable condition, we have one patient that has died and we have one patient that has refused medical attention.
"This was an extremely dangerous operation for our firefighters.
"We responded to a call of a collapse in the building, we had firefighters inside the building conducting searches, the building was continuing to collapse, we made the decision to remove all our people from the building."
Neighbouring buildings that included New York University's Pace Building were evacuated and all classes were cancelled for students.
Mr Esposito added: "Our robotics unit happened to be nearby, they were on scene very quickly.
"We deployed our robot dog into the building, they were able to give us video inside and then we were able to fly our drones inside to conduct an assessment and conduct searches.
"Although we continue to make sure that we have everyone accounted for, at this time we believe we have the workers that were in danger in the building accounted for, all out of the building, and that structure is very unstable.
"We've had some of the slabs, a couple of floors of the concrete slab floors, collapse, crush some of the cars that were inside and this will be a prolonged operation."
New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell added: "At this time we have no reason to believe this is anything other than a structural collapse, obviously this investigation will continue.
"Our preliminary response center are making this area safe, that includes traffic control and evacuating the nearby Pace university building which was deemed unstable at that time.
"We will continue to work in collaboration with our partners in the fire department in this effort."
