Deadly Garage Collapse Was Caused by ‘Reckless' Repairs, Report Finds
Hours before a Lower Manhattan parking garage collapsed in 2023, killing an employee and injuring seven other people, workers had inadvertently destroyed part of a load-bearing pier on its second floor, a report released Monday concluded.
The garage, at 57 Ann Street, near City Hall, had long been plagued by faulty construction and engineering missteps, the report found. Neither the engineering firm renovating the building nor garage workers had reported the unsafe conditions, and they never obtained the permits necessary to fix them, the report said.
The report was prepared by a structural engineering firm in collaboration with the city's Department of Buildings, Department of Investigation and the Manhattan district attorney's office, which found no evidence of criminality.
In a statement accompanying the report's release, Jimmy Oddo, New York City's buildings commissioner, said the 'reckless' repair work was partially to blame for the collapse of the garage.
'The extensive multiagency investigation into this catastrophic collapse makes one point abundantly clear: This tragedy in the heart of Lower Manhattan was entirely preventable,' Mr. Oddo said.
On April 18, 2023, a bit before 9 a.m., workers began removing bricks from the load-bearing column, leaving behind a gaping hole near the ceiling of the garage's second floor, the report said. A few minutes after 4 p.m., a garage employee drove a car across the roof, directly above the column.
Seconds later, the building collapsed, killing Willis Moore, a 59 year-old manager who had worked at the garage for more than a decade. Several other garage workers were injured, including one who was trapped on an upper floor and another who fell from the second floor to the first, according to ABC7.
Though the demolition work on the column caused the building to collapse, engineering and construction missteps over the years made the building unstable, according to the report, which spanned more than 3,000 pages. When the building was constructed in 1925, builders didn't connect the pier to a wall shared with a neighboring building.
This set the stage for the piers to deteriorate in the near-century that followed, the report said. Photos of the garage's second floor taken the year before the collapse show large cracks running down the second-floor column.
The company operating the garage, Little Man Parking, had chosen Experion Design Group, a New York-based architecture and engineering firm, to make repairs to the building to comply with a 2021 law requiring routine inspections of parking structures. The Ann Street garage would have had to file its first inspection just nine months after the collapse.
Neither Little Man nor Experion reported the cracking to city authorities, which they are required to do under city construction codes, the report said.
A renovation plan by Experion failed to identify that the column was made entirely of load-bearing brick, according to the report. The Little Man employees performing the repairs were doing so without city permits or approved engineering plans.
After employees removed the bricks from the pier, the garage's general manager texted a photo of the hole left behind to a project manager at Experion. Roughly an hour before the collapse, the project manager told the garage workers to put the bricks back, but 'did not communicate urgency,' the report said.
Representatives for Experion and Little Man could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Jeff Roth, the city's deputy mayor of operations, said in a statement that the collapse highlighted the importance of the city's construction regulations.
'The tragedy at Ann Street reminds us that every time un-permitted work occurs, it could literally lead to loss of life,' Mr. Roth said.
Two decades before the building collapsed, its owner was cited for structural issues and fined $800, according to a summary of the violation. City records show no sign issues were ever fixed. The garage was cited again in 2009 for exceeding its capacity.
The collapse on Ann Street drew attention to problems in parking garages across the city. A New York Times report in 2023 found that more than three dozen parking garages had serious structural issues.
Though no criminal charges will be filed in relation to the collapse, the Department of Buildings issued civil citations, including seven to the building's owners.
The agency also ordered third-party reviews of all parking structures in the city that were operated by Little Man or worked on by Experion.
The report included several recommendations for strengthening city oversight of parking structure repairs and inspections. In the statement announcing the report, the Department of Buildings said it had created a 'proactive enforcement unit' to inspect parking structures that have fallen into disrepair. The unit will begin operating later this year.
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