Port-au-Prince.– A hillside school where roughly 500 students usually crowded into several floors collapsed during classes on Friday, in Petionville, killing at least 47 people and injuring many more.

Rescuers used bare hands to pull bleeding students from the wreckage. More children were believed buried in the rubble of the concrete building, and the death toll was likely to go higher, Yphosiane Vil, an civil protection official, told the press at the scene.

Neighbors suspected the building was poorly rebuilt after it partially collapsed eight years ago, said Jimmy Germain, a French teacher at the school. He said people who lived just downhill abandoned their land out of fear that the building would tumble onto them, and that the school's owner tried to buy up their vacated properties.

The concrete building's third story was still under construction, and Petionville Mayor Claire Lydie Parent said she suspects a structural defect caused the collapse, not the recent rains.