Philly Safety Agency Can’t or Won’t Say How Many Buildings Collapsed | DENENA | POINTS
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Philly Safety Agency Can’t or Won’t Say How Many Buildings Collapsed

Things keep looking worse and worse for the embattled Philly safety agency charged with preventing building collapses. The Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) is the agency all other city agencies call to investigate when a structural collapse occurs. But our structural failure attorneys note that the agency either can’t or won’t say how many buildings have collapsed in recent years.

The horrific collapse of a Market Street building into a Salvation Army store in June brought the issue of structural instabilities in Philly to national attention. That disaster, the result of a badly conducted demolition, killed 6 and injured 13. The contractor operating an excavator at the time of the collapse has been charged with murder. Since then, news reports have provided regular reports of further Philadelphia collapses, at least one more of them fatal. That was the Center City collapse of a balcony fire escape a few weeks ago. The three people on the balcony fell over 30 feet. A man in his 20s was killed by the tragic fall, and two women sustained broken backs from the balcony collapse and now must undergo costly, long-term therapies and rehabilitations.

In addition, as an in-depth article by William Bender on philly.com (3/6/14) reports, there have been several other recent building collapses:

  • Collapse of a house two months after the Market Street collapse into the Salvation Army store that forced the evacuation of a group home for the disabled. (The structural failure attorneys at Denena Points, PC remark that the pattern of structural failures indicates that it’s disproportionately affecting lower income areas.)
  • A row house in September that displaced residents on either side. We reiterate that, as the collapse into the Salvation Army store clearly demonstrates, damage doesn’t always confine itself to the building’s own footprint; very often it affects and damages neighboring buildings, sidewalks, and streets.
  • A West Philadelphia home that collapsed three weeks later.
  • At least 4 buildings just in the last month, including two that collapsed on the very same day.

It’s only natural that given the ongoing reports of serious structural failures, people should want to know the numbers on how many have fallen in recent years. Philadelphia residents particularly might like to know which neighborhoods experience the greatest dangers of sudden structural collapses, and whether the problem has been getting worse or possibly better over recent years. But inquiries on that topic are met with stubborn resistance. Our structural failure attorneys emphasize that such resistance won’t disguise the problem. The ongoing plague of building collapses speaks for itself.

Yet the ongoing resistance has taken various forms:

  • A ‘blue ribbon” commission investigating L&I that includes a structural engineer and a disaster response expert has apparently met with resistance. According to the philly.com report, L&I says its “cannot determine how many buildings have collapsed in recent years” because the incident descriptions are “buried in an unsearchable database.” We ask: what is the use of an unsearchable database? Or is burying the incident reports its purpose? How is the agency charged with responding to, investigating, and preventing structural collapses supposed to do its job adequately if it can’t determine how many buildings are collapsing or where they’re collapsing to analyze problematic trends? That just doesn’t make a bit of sense.
  • Bennett Levin, who ran L&I a couple of decades ago in the mid-90s said he doubts that L&I is actually unable to produce building collapse records. He implies that the department could produce such records in the mid-90s (when generally database technology was less advanced). Philly.com’s report quoted him as saying in regards to the city’s L&I department: “You’re dealing with the KGB.” It seems likely he would know better than most; since he used to run the department.
  • The Daily News tried to get a list of building collapses for the past 5 years. A spokesman for Mayor Nutter (we won’t comment on that name in regards to this perplexing circus of information hide and seek) told the Daily News to file a Right-to-Know request. Which was then denied by one of the city’s lawyers. The denial said that the records don’t exist and that the city isn’t required to compile or organize records in response to a request. (In other words, you have no right-to-know.) So our structural failure attorneys wonder why they even waste paper on the request form?
  • Three months after the right-to-know request was met with a stone wall, an L&I spokeswoman said the agency did maintain records of building collapses. But apparently they’re organized by type of violation so that the uninitiated can’t easily obtain them. How Byzantine. How convenient for Philadelphia and its L&I department. Kafka could write a lovely novel based around L&I (if he were still writing). The spokeswoman later clarified that there are notes in the system “regarding the underlying cause” of the records (we’re presuming that means “building collapses”), but that these notes are not searchable and not retrievable. Then why add the notes in the first place? Isn’t that a patent waste of time? Not to mention the taxpayer dollars going towards paying for the time used to add the unsearchable and irretrievable notes?
  • The City Controller, Alan Butkovitz, who we point out will be running for mayor in 2015 and also may have an agenda here, says that the stalling regarding L&I building collapse records is typical of an administration that he classifies as not transparent and with a marked tendency to clamp down on information. He said his department had to subpoena L&I because the agency refused to turn over information about building inspections. Later, the agency gave Butkovitz’s department access to the L&I database. Butkovitz said that the information found in the database “Doesn’t really support their initial contentions.” But unfortunately it’s unclear from the story what the initial contentions were or how the data doesn’t support it.
  • Freelance journalist Andrew Johnson tried to obtain building collapse records going back 10 years. But after weeks of trying, he came up empty-handed. And he said that L&I spokeswoman Swanson insisted that “Market Street” (the fatal collapse into the Salvation Army store) “wasn’t a building collapse.” Seriously? What would one call it, pray tell?
  • Mr. Johnson comments that first one would have to file a Right-to-Know request to find out the specific terms under which L&I classifies data. Then you would have to file other request(s) to ask for the information filed under those terms. And the data in William Bender’s article indicates that:

1.The requests might well be denied; and

2.The relevant information you needed might be in the notes that were both unsearchable and irretrievable.

The information gathering controversy would seem comical were it not for the many lives lost and endangered due to structural failures in Philadelphia.

The city responds that they have “responded quickly and fully” to requests from the grand jury Inspector General, the City Controller, the Special Investigating Committee to the Inspector General, and the Special Independent Advisory Commission. The city also says it has responded to thousands of media requests for information (though it doesn’t specify how it responded to the media requests).

The executive director of the blue ribbon commission mentioned earlier in this post suggests that there may be hope on the horizon for those who want to track building collapses in the city of Philadelphia. By the end of 2015, an electronic data reporting and sharing system called eCLIPSE (electronic Commercial Licensing, Inspection, and Permit Services Enterprise) is expected to be operational. The executive director doesn’t really clarify what that system’s capabilities or improvements will be; he simply implies that it will be better than the existing one. (Many things would, evidently.)

The structural failure attorneys at Denena Points, PC aren’t sanguine regarding the name of the new database; after all, an eclipse is the result of one body obscuring another to replace light with darkness. The imagery doesn’t bode well for people’s hopes regarding government “transparency.” (We merely point this out, hoping that our thoughts here are incorrect.) Click the link to learn about Mayor Nutter’s announcement regarding an increased budget and staff for L&I in the next fiscal year.