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5-Story Downtown San Antonio Building Collapses At Least Three Injured

POSTED: 10:24 a.m. EST December 4, 2002 UPDATED: 11:00 a.m. EST December 4, 2002

SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- The front of a historic office building under renovation has toppled into the street in downtown San Antonio, Texas, today.

At least three construction workers were injured and were transported in undetermined condition to Brooke Army Medical Center. Crews are in the process of removing rubble that was estimated to be 8-foot high at the accident site.

"It happened so fast," said Paul Hernandez, a man who witnessed the collapse. "We tried to look for other people, but we could not find anybody."

Every available San Antonio police officer and San Antonio firefighter is being dispatched to the scene.

Sgt. Gabe Trevino, of the San Antonio Police Department, told MSNBC that police believe there may be two or three pedestrians trapped in the rubble. Some of the debris may have fallen on the pedestrians. He said witnesses had told the police they saw people there when the building collapsed.

Authorities are picking through the rubble for anyone else who might be trapped.

Video footage shows that the front of the building fell, leaving a mound of brick and masonry on the ground. Nothing is left standing but a framework of girders.

The building dated back to the 1880s. Trevino said the building had been gutted but construction crews were trying to preserve the front for historical value.

The building on East Commerce Street at Navarro collapsed about 8:45 a.m. Central time.

-- Anonymous, December 04, 2002

Answers

UPDATED: Workers to take down another wall at collapse site By William Pack and Elaine Aradillas

Express-News Staff Writers

Web Posted : 12/04/2002 6:45 PM

City officials have decided to tear down the north wall of the Karotkin Building this evening because it was supported by the same type of bracing as the structure's south wall, which collapsed this morning, leaving at least three people injured.

Florencio Pena, the city's director of development services, announced plans to bring down the wall at a news conference City Manager Terry Brechtel held this evening to address the collapse of the 102-year-old, five-story building.

Officials also announced at the news conference that city inspectors had checked the bracing after receiving a complaint Sept. 24 that the construction work resembled a "Hollywood prop."

City inspectors found that the bracing met the requirements of the permit granted for the work. As a backup, the city also had the structural engineer for the project's contractor assess the bracing. He, too, found it to be acceptable under the terms of the permit.

Rescue workers are continuing to dig in the rubble left by the collapsed façade, checking to see whether anyone else was buried under the debris.

Witnesses told authorities earlier in the day that there could be several people underneath the debris that fell around 9 a.m. in the 200 block of Commerce Street.

Digging was suspended for several hours, beginning at noon, so workers could stabilize the remainder of the building, which was being converted into a luxury hotel on the River Walk.

Once that work was completed around 3 p.m., about 30 rescue workers began removing debris by hand from the site where a Bexar County Sheriff's Department canine unit picked up what could be the scent of people trapped underneath the rubble, Fire Department spokesman Randy Jenkins said.

Sheriff's Deputy Inocencio Badillo said there have been reports that several other people may have been buried in the building's debris.

"Based on witnesses, they're telling the Fire Department, and they're telling us, there's between three and seven people" underneath the rubble, Badillo said.

Authorities know for sure that three people were injured as a result of the collapse.

They include two construction workers. One of them suffered a head injury and was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center. The other was taken to University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition.

The third injured man is a firefighter who was treated at the scene of the collapse.

Jenkins said the worker who suffered the head injury had been "walking underneath the temporary walkway" when "the façade fell like a deck of cards."

San Antonio Police Department spokesman Gabe Trevino said a security camera at a garage across the street from the building had captured the collapse on film, but it was too dark at the time to tell whether anybody else was using the temporary walkway that was built to take pedestrians around the construction work.

Trevino also said that officials had accounted for the other workers on the project.

Fire Department spokesman Tommy Thompson said the collapse "could have been a lot worse." "If this had been a nicer day and a different time of the day, there could have been a lot more people here," he said.

A VIA bus also was hit by debris, but no one on the bus was believed to be injured.

Fire Captain Frank Willborn, who went to New York City to assist efforts there after the World Trade Center collapsed in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, described these types of rescue efforts as "slow."

"That's the hard part," Willborn said. "You have to take it off piece by piece."

Deputy City Manager Rolando Bono said the city called on a structural engineer independent from the building contractor to check on the rear facade of the building today to determine how sound it is.

Once fire officials complete the recovery work and clear the building for reuse, a larger team of city officials, including building inspection and code compliance officials, will assess the structure and walls in the adjoining buildings to determine what other repairs might be needed.

Bono said final decisions would be guided by input from independent structural engineers, along with architects and engineers employed by the city.

"It will be a multiday effort," Bono said.

Construction on the project began shortly after La Mansion Hotels Ltd. announced in March that it had obtained financing and planned to begin converting what was a four-story building into a seven-story hotel and spa that would be called the Watermark.

Bono said La Mansion and the owners of historic buildings on each side of the Karotkin Building teamed with the city to expand the buildings' basements so they would tie on to the River Walk, which was beautified and improved in a project completed about a year ago.

The hotel, which would be across the River Walk from La Mansion del Rio Hotel, was set to open next November.

"They had brought it down and were reconstructing it from the ground up," said Antonio Diaz, head of guest services at the nearby Westin Hotel.

Mayor Ed Garza, who is in Salt Lake City for a National League of Cities conference, called the incident "unfortunate," both because of the injuries it caused and the setback it represents for the developers of a "very unique project" in an important area of downtown San Antonio.

"This is a visible parcel and one that deserves high quality, and that's what the Watermark represents," Garza said.

He praised La Mansion Hotels Ltd. for trying to work the historic facade of the building into the new resort development, saying that kind of work "does not happen a lot." The mayor hopes the resort project moves forward despite the collapse.

Garza said he had not been given any idea about the cause of the collapse but hoped to learn something soon. The mayor was unwilling to discuss any corrective action the city should consider until a cause is established.

"We need to find out what went wrong with this specific situation before we come up with any recommendations," he said.

Garza said he assumed the two adjoining buildings would be checked for damage, but he did not suspect those structures would exhibit similar problems as those that caused the collapse. The Karotkin Building had been reduced to its facades by the renovation work, while the adjacent buildings remain whole. The Karotkin Building was more vulnerable to potential collapse as a result, the mayor said.

Ann McGlone, the city's historic preservation officer, said the building is on the site of what had been the Frank Strauss Building, which began operation in 1879 as the city's first wholesale saddlery. She said the structure has some historic protective value.

"It is so sad to have it go down," McGlone said. "I'm just devastated."

-- Anonymous, December 04, 2002

I saw the headline and thought it was about the building Bundy lived in once. It burned. dunno why that came to mind...

-- Anonymous, December 05, 2002