A China hotel housing coronavirus patients in quarantine collapsed Saturday night, leading to a rescue effort that left at least 70 trapped, according to reports.

The five-story Fujian province hotel went down in southeast Chinese port city of Quanzhou around 7:30 p.m. local time, according to the U.K.'s Independent.

"I was just having dinner and I suddenly heard a loud bang and thought it was an explosion," a man living an across the street told the South China Morning Post. "It was not until I ran to my balcony that I saw that the entire hotel building had collapsed."

There have been 29 people rescued, with nearly 150 firefighters involved in the rescue effort, according to reports.

A video of the rescue effort has been posted on Twitter.

Reuters reported 38 of the 70 trapped in the rubble has been rescued.

A video stream posted by the government-backed Beijing News site showed rescue workers in orange overalls clambering over rubble and twisted steelwork carrying people toward  ambulances.

"I was at a gas station and heard a loud noise. I looked up and the whole building collapsed. Dust was everywhere, and glass fragments were flying around," a witness said in a video posted on the Miaopai streaming app.

"I was so terrified that my hands and legs were shivering."

A woman named only by her surname, Chen, told the Beijing News website that relatives including her sister had been under quarantine at the hotel as prescribed by local regulations after returning from Hubei province, where the coronavirus emerged.

She said they had been scheduled to leave soon after completing their 14 days of isolation.

"I can't contact them, they're not answering their phones, she said.

"I'm under quarantine too [at another hotel] and I'm very worried, I don't know what to do. They were healthy, they took their temperatures every day, and the tests showed that everything was normal."

The municipality said 36 emergency rescue vehicles such as cranes and excavators, 67 firefighting vehicles, 15 ambulances, and more than 700 firefighters, medical and other rescue workers were at the scene as the operation stretched into the night.

Quanzhou is a port city on the Taiwan Strait in the province of Fujian with a population of more than 8 million.

The official People's Daily said the hotel had opened in June 2018 with 80 rooms.

Beijing News' video stream was viewed by more than 2 million Weibo users on Saturday evening, and the hotel's collapse was the top trending topic on the Weibo site, China's close equivalent to Twitter.

Some users demanded a investigation into how the hotel could have collapsed.

Anger has been building up against the authorities in China over their early handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 3,300 people globally, most of them in China.

The Fujian provincial government said that as of Friday, the province had 296 cases of coronavirus and 10,819 people had been placed under observation after being classified as suspected close contacts.

Information from Reuters was used in this report.