Windsor, Ontario, Canada. - Rescue crews were relieved to find no one trapped in the rubble after a downtown Windsor parking garage collapsed Thursday, sending one man to hospital and crushing several cars. Mayor Eddie Francis declared a state of emergency after the two-level underground structure caved in around 10:40 a.m., enabling the city to gain access to provincial emergency response teams that would delve into the wreckage to help search for any victims.Paramedics used a pulley to lift one male victim from the gaping hole behind 1368 Ouellette Ave., a professional building that houses Windsor West MPP Sandra Pupatello's constituency office, Thai Silk restaurant and a number of other tenants on the upper floors. The victim was transported to Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, wearing a neck brace and grimacing in apparent pain.
Police said he suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Witnesses said the man was operating a boom truck near the Dufferin Street entrance in preparation for maintenance work on the building - possibly painting or washing windows -- when the pavement gave way.
"He went to go into the parking lot there and he got in the middle and the whole thing just went under," said Jodine Vincent, who watched it happen from her porch. "I said to my son, 'Oh my God, the ground just dropped.'" Ron Piper, a former construction worker who was in his house just north of the parking lot and who was one of the first people on the scene, said the boom truck operator was knocked out of his cab and seemed dazed. "He was hanging by his safety belt," said Piper, who figures the weight of the crane caused the collapse. "His face was bleeding. His legs were bleeding."
Several of the eight vehicles parked on the ground level of the structure were tilting into the hole, some resting precariously on yellow steel pillars. Concrete reinforcing bars jutted out from the steel supports and the jagged edges of the grey concrete and black asphalt opened to the underground level, where an unknown number of vehicles were also parked. As the hours went by, the hole slowly grew wider and the cars slid further in.
Emergency crews evacuated the adjacent Ambassador apartment building at 1382 Ouellette Ave. as a precaution. Residents were shuttled to the St. Clair Centre for the Arts via Transit Windsor buses until accommodations could be arranged. Francis said the tenants will be put up in hotels until the building is declared safe.
Chris Dejaegher, of Chatham, who was studying at the CompuCampus private career college next door at the Bay Group Place building, had parked his 1998 Honda Accord on the doomed parking structure. After a secretary told students to evacuate the building, he exited to find his car dipping forward on the sinking garage floor. Still, Dejaegher said he is thankful his narrow miss didn't turn out worse. "Fifteen minutes before it happened I was sitting in my car eating lunch," Dejaegher said. "I feel very lucky. The whole day is just a big shock.
Richard Jones lives next door to the parking lot and was inside his house when he heard the commotion. "It was like two big semi trucks hitting each other," he said. "We heard the thud and the shake and the trembles and we came out and then we saw that it collapsed. It was like a miniature earthquake or something. The whole house, the windows and everything shook."
Steve Serecin, who works on the second floor of the office building where the structure collapsed, grabbed his first aid kit as soon as he looked out the window and saw the sinkhole. When he reached the boom truck, he saw one of the building owners already on the scene, assisting the truck operator. "He was trying to help him out of the basket, because I think he was kind of hanging from it, dangling from the safety cord," Serecin said. "It looked like something straight out of a Hollywood movie," said Mike Brennan of the Kidney Foundation, which has an office on the third floor of the building. "It was terrifying."
A number of doctors' offices are also in the building, including that of an oral surgeon. Some surgeries were taking place in the midst of all the commotion outside. Provincial emergency response teams from Toronto and Bolton were dispatched with search dogs, and Windsor police used a robot with cameras to comb through the underground structure to look for victims. The dogs did not find anyone below. The Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Team was also sent to the scene to shore up the structure with specialized equipment.
Police, fire and city officials have not been able to confirm the cause of the collapse. Some witnesses speculated Windsor's five-day heat wave may have contributed to the accident, while others suggested the machinery was simply too heavy for the structure. "I don't know if it's heat-related or not. Upon talking to the engineer --preliminary -- he didn't think so," said Windsor Fire and Rescue's John Lee. A municipal building inspector said he wasn't willing to speculate on the cause of the accident. "I really can't say. There's a lot of things that we see that lead us to believe that this may be simply an accident, but we won't know until everything's done," he said.
He added that he believed the boom truck had been on the premises before Thursday's accident, without incident. "Maybe he was here when there were no other cars. I don't know. The parking lot was fairly full. Whatever happened, obviously the floor up there couldn't take the load that was on it." Francis said the parking garage and the building on Ouellette Avenue were built in 1948 and are the responsibility of a private owner. Signs on the building bear the name Bay Group Place. Francis said the building and the parking garage have been inspected numerous times over the years because of various additions and changing tenants.
As far as the city can tell, there have been no issues with the structural integrity of the parking garage in the past and no work orders have been issued. The collapse may prompt a safety review of similar facilities in the city, Francis said. "I think it's incumbent on us as a municipality to look into this ... and make sure that something like this never happens again," Francis told reporters. He said the scope of such a review will depend on investigators' findings on the cause of Thursday's collapse. The Ministry of Labour has been called in to secure the site and conduct its own investigation, since a worker was injured on the job. The parking garage and a stretch of Dufferin Street will remain cordoned off today.
CITY REVIEW
The 10,100-kilogram Genie S-65 telescopic boom, such as the one that was at the site of Thursday's parking garage collapse, has a maximum working height of 21.8 metres and is often used for reaching areas with limited access in construction and industrial applications. Brian Cazabon, manager at Centreline Equipment Rentals Ltd. said the telescopic boom was rented through him and included safety instructions with the rental. "Everything we rent out, a customer gets safety instructions and are made to initial a line that they received the safety instructions prior to using the machine," Cazabon said. "There was for sure safety instructions on this unit." The units are sold for approximately $165,600 and are rented for $400 a day from Centreline.
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