A Lower Manhattan multi-storey parking garage collapsed on Tuesday afternoon, with decks of cars crashing down killing one and injuring four others.
The building, which dates to the 1950s and is in the financial district of Lower Manhattan just blocks away from Wall Street, collapsed “pancaked collapsed all the way to the cellar floor” a little after 4 pm on Tuesday afternoon. Several people were injured including four who required hospitalisation, and one person was killed in the collapse.
The Fire Chief said: “That structure is very unstable. It’s a parking garage, we’ve had a couple of floors of the concrete slab floors collapse and crush the cars inside. This will be a prolonged operation”. The NY Police Chief said there was no reason to believe there was anything other than “structural collapse” to blame but that a building of Pace University next door to the garage had been evacuated as further collapses were feared.
A member of the New York Fire Department (FDNY) walks past a car covered in rubble at the scene of a parking lot collapse in lower Manhattan, New York, April 18, 2023. (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
The facade of a partially collapsed parking garage buckles, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, in the Financial District of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Cars are seen piled on top of each other at the scene of a partial collapse of a parking garage in the Financial District of New York, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
All those who were thought to be in the building at the time of the collapse are said to have been accounted for, but New York Mayor Eric Adams suggested whether there were undetected members of the public inside as well remained an open question, saying at a press briefing: “We are doing whatever we can to see if we have any more victims”
The building was “continuing to collapse” after the Fire Department deployed first responders, their spokesman said, and they withdrew their men and deployed a robotic ‘dog’ to the “extremely dangerous” scene to gather information inside and assist with the search and rescue. Praising the utility of the robot in building collapses, the Mayor said: “I do want to point out that thank God we had the robotic dog that was able to go inside the building. This is ideally what we talk about, not sending a human being inside a building that’s unstable.
“We were also able to use a drone to give a real visualisation of what’s happening in this building. At this time, the building is completely unstable. We do not want to send someone inside the building until we know it is shored up.”
Although there is no indication of what caused the Lower Manhattan collapse at this stage, the building’s fall comes just weeks after structural engineers warned that the increasing popularity of electric cars — which because of their batteries can be considerably heavier than conventional vehicles — could see garages collapse in future.
Speaking to UK paper The Daily Telegraph, engineer Chris Whapples said there is “potential for some of the early car parks in poor condition to collapse” and that owners of garages should get structural assessments of their lots done and decide whether they can take the weight of all modern cars. “We have height restrictions in car parks, why not weight”, he said.
FDNY firefighters investigate the site of a parking garage collapse (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) Emergency Medical Services (EMS) move an injured person (Photo by PETER GERBER/AFP via Getty Images)
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