Rescuers pulled three people from the rubble of a nine-story hotel under construction in Angeles City on Monday, while the death toll climbed to four and 17 people were still missing after the building collapsed before dawn on Sunday.

The collapse hit a city in Pampanga Province after a fierce thunderstorm and left emergency crews racing through a mound of concrete slabs, twisted iron bars and aluminum scaffoldings. One trapped man was given water and medicine intravenously as rescuers worked nearby, and emergency personnel also tried to revive another man in an ambulance near the rubble. Two of the men pulled out were dead.

The missing were mostly construction workers, and many of them had been sleeping inside the unfinished building on pieces of plywood when it gave way in the early morning hours. Twenty-six workers were either rescued or managed to run out of the collapsing structure, while hundreds of rescuers led by firefighters and police kept searching on Monday for anyone still alive.

Mayor Carmelo Lazatin said his focus remained on survival, saying his best hope was that more people could be rescued alive and that he did not want to bring bad news to families waiting at the site. His caution reflected the brutal arithmetic of the scene: every hour that passed made the chances of finding the missing slimmer, even as crews pressed deeper into the wreckage.

The collapse also killed a Malaysian tourist trapped in a budget inn partly hit by debris, while another guest was injured but managed to dash out. Jess Mendez said of one of the men pulled from the rubble, “He never made it despite all the efforts,” a line that captured the day’s harshest outcome.

Angeles City lies in Luzon, the northern Philippine region, not far from the former Clark Air Base, which closed in the early 1990s and later became the Clark Freeport Zone. That geography has made the city a busy commercial center, but on Monday the focus was not on growth or traffic or business — it was on the search for the missing and the question of how an unfinished high-rise could fail so completely.

National police chief Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. said his force would support an ongoing investigation into the cause of the collapse and any possible violations of safety and building regulations. Investigators now face a building site reduced to debris and a long list of missing workers, with families still waiting for names to be matched to the dead and the living.