Six people died after the top floor of a building under construction collapsed on Friday at Syokimau, on the south-eastern edge of Nairobi, Kenya's capital. A police official, Duncan Ochieng, the assistant inspector general in charge of disaster management, told reporters at the scene that six bodies had been confirmed and that five people had been rushed to Imara Daima Hospital. He said 405 workers were on site.

The building was reported as eight storeys, with work under way on the ninth floor, and stood beside the Syokimau access road to the Nairobi terminus of the Standard Gauge Railway, off Mombasa Road, the main highway to the port of Mombasa. Three bodies were recovered first and three more later. The Nairobi City County report counted five survivors pulled out alive, while the Kenya Red Cross counted three. The county fire brigade and its Urban Search and Rescue team worked through the debris, and officials of the National Construction Authority were at the scene. Authorities asked drivers to avoid the stretch of Mombasa Road near the terminus.S1S2

The county's preliminary report said the top slab caved in while workers were operating, and other early reports say the building partially collapsed during concreting on an upper floor after a failure of the formwork, the temporary moulds that hold wet concrete in place. These findings are preliminary and no official investigation report has yet been published, so the cause could change once engineers examine the structure. Officials have not said how many workers were on site in total, who owns the building or who the contractor is, and reports differ on whether the site lies in Nairobi County or Machakos County.S2

The collapse follows a string of construction accidents in the city. Three weeks earlier, on 23 October 2026, another building under construction fell in Eastleigh, and a tower under construction fell in the South C district in early January 2026. The recurrence has renewed attention on building-site safety in Nairobi.S1S2