A home-owner points at cracks in his townhouse in Lat Phrao’s Wang Thong Lang district. The house was one of the eight that were falling apart yesterday, prompting the district authority to declare the area a danger zone.

 Eight townhouses falling apart in Lat Phrao's Wang Thong Lang district were yesterday declared a danger zone by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.

Residents were told to get out of the block of eight four-storey townhouses after BMA engineers found the houses were sinking at a rate of 0.7mm per minute.

Walls and pillars began cracking on Saturday and, by yesterday afternoon when BMA engineers arrived for an inspection, the houses had sunk 70cm from their original level.

Deputy Wang Thong Lang district chief Prawet Piantham said the townhouses, in the Sin Thani Village in Lat Phrao soi 80, had been built on an old rice field, and the foundation pillars might not have been properly laid.

He said the first reports of trouble in the village came on Saturday and BMA officials hurriedly ordered an evacuation yesterday.

He said engineers were working to determine whether the buildings could be salvaged or should be demolished.

Wang Thong Lang police superintendent Colonel Surasak Prakkamakul said no injuries or deaths had been reported and police were waiting for the BMA to determine whether the case constituted a breach of the Building Control Act.

The real estate developer will face charges if there has been a breach of the Act, he said.

An owner living in the estate, Chitlada Saengthongsuk, 37, lives above her office in the village and said she heard a loud snapping noise and found cracks in beams on Saturday morning.

Yesterday morning, she heard four even louder snapping noises and immediately told her 10 staff and family members to get out of the house.

"We were only out for about five minutes and found the house had subsided, damaging the walls and ceilings, and there was dust all over the place.

"I don't think the estate owner is going to take responsibility for this, because the house has been transferred and this village has not been looked after for a long time," she said.

Chitlada said the village was completed in 1997, and many houses had already faced subsidence problems. Knowing this, she bought a townhouse in 2004, thinking the problems had ended.

She said an architect had told her that her home had the strongest foundations in the block and everything would be fine.