The structural collapse lawyers at Denena & Points remark that the façade of the venerable TD Bank building on Haddon Avenue in Collingswood, NJ collapsed in a rush of sound and rubble around 4 a.m. last Wednesday morning. The bank building had fallen into disuse some time ago and was being offered on the local real estate market.
While some interest had been expressed in the building from time to time, no contracts or serious offers were yet in place at the time of the sudden structural collapse. The TD Bank building has since been retracted from the market and the leasing agent says that it will remain unavailable until work has been completed to ensure the building is safe.
Later into Wednesday morning, bits and pieces of the façade were reportedly still falling away from the edifice. The building had been cordoned off after the collapse for safety, but it took some time for responders to assess the situation and assemble teams to begin deconstructing the building the hard way: section by section with cement saws and hammers. Workers in the foyer have piled parts of the venerable façade judged worth saving for the building’s reconstruction as work proceeds.
Our structural collapse lawyers point out that speculation as to the cause of the structural collapse remains just that: spec. Building and code enforcement authorities appear to be refusing to comment on the accident or to release records regarding the building’s inspection history. Some people attribute the façade’s weakened state and sudden collapse to damage from last year’s eastern Seaboard earthquake. Others cite the possibility of water intrusion.
But poor initial construction, weakened materials, and compromised connections between the TD Bank façade and the primary structure could also have caused the dangerous façade failure. Indeed, our structural collapse lawyers stress the point that weak or inadequate connectors are the primary cause of structural failures in buildings both old and new. Decks, balconies, railings, walls, higher floors, and entire buildings fall from rotten, rusted, loosened, poorly made, inadequate spaced, and just plain weak structural connectors.
One local business owner expressed his profound relief that the collapse occurred in the wee hours of Wednesday morning when no one was around to be injured by the sudden descent of the mountain of building rubble. He pointed out that had the accident occurred just a few days later, on Saturday, the structural collapse might not only have injured, but killed, quite a number of innocent victims.
The town’s well-attended May Fair was scheduled for the following Saturday and would have included the very street and sidewalk where the rubble fell so precipitously. Our structural collapse lawyers also find relief in the fortuity of this timing. Because tragedy was averted by the off-hours timing of the façade collapse, we can examine the incident as an interesting study in structural failure rather than as a depressing tragedy.
Read about another sudden collapse of a venerable, old building in our article on the fatal NYC warehouse collapse in Harlem.