Ayyyeee… What’s Goodie Everyone. So I got some tea and it involves Parking garage closures after a collapse that occured in Manhattan a week ago.
New York City officials found structural problems at four other garages so dangerous they ordered the buildings at least partially vacated. This comes in the wake of a deadly collapse of a parking garage in Lower Manhattan last week.
At those four garages two in Manhattan and two in Brooklyn the city’s Buildings Department found that the structures had “deteriorated to the point where they were now posing an immediate threat to public safety,” said Andrew Rudansky, a spokesman for the department.
The discoveries, he said, came during inspections of garages conducted after the April 18 collapse of a garage on Ann Street in the Financial District in Manhattan that left its manager dead in the rubble and five others injured. Engineers found that a two-story garage at 2781 Stillwell Avenue in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn was in “severe disrepair,” Rudansky said. The department issued a “full vacate order” for the entire building and ordered its owners to close for business and immediately retain a professional engineer to compile a structural report, he said.
In a multilevel garage beneath a 25-story apartment building in Battery Park City, engineers found concrete that was “extensively corroded” and “spalled concrete” on the underside of two floor slabs, Rudansky said. Spalling is a sign that concrete is deteriorating. It often happens when water seeps into the concrete and corrodes steel bars embedded inside the slab. The corroded steel expands and causes the concrete to crack and crumble, or spall.
At the Battery Park City garage, at 225 Rector Place, the Buildings Department ordered 60 percent of the structure to be vacated and directed the owners to install a protective pathway for drivers to reach their cars safely in the rest of the garage, Rudansky said.
He said the department ordered the building’s owners to retain a professional engineer to compile a structural report on the garage, but added that the department’s engineers did not find any reason for the apartments above the garage to be vacated.
While the investigation into the cause of the Ann Street collapse continues, inspectors fanned out to assess the condition of 78 garages across the city. Rudansky said 17 of those garages were managed by the same company that managed the one that collapsed. The other 61 had previously been cited for serious structural issues that the department’s records showed had not been resolved, he said.
Garages in other parts of the city will also be required to have inspections, but with later deadlines to file their first reports.
Credit: The New York Times.
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