The Record: Structural integrity

Tuesday, February 14, 2012    Last updated: Wednesday February 15, 2012, 10:47 AM

Hackensack officials are right to be extra careful about making sure the city's many parking garages are not in danger of falling down.

After the collapse of a parking garage at a high-rise apartment building on Prospect Street a year and a half ago, officials asked operators of 64 similar garages in the city to inspect their facilities and to document the structural integrity of their garages through an engineer's report. The owners of an office building at 5 Summit Ave. responded with a letter from an architect, not an engineer, that said all was well.

That would normally seem to be good enough.

But in the aftermath of a major garage collapse, it wasn't.

After doing its own inspection, the city shut down the two-story garage underneath the two-story office building at the corner of Summit Avenue and Essex Street. A sign this week across an entrance said simply, "Offices open, parking lot under construction."

Building manager Marjorie Reilly was dismayed, telling The Record last week that she was "baffled" by the city's actions, adding, "We had an engineer come in, and he said there were no unsafe conditions.''

Not necessarily, say city officials, who said their inspection found cracked concrete walls and rotting support beams. In fact, the city says one beam was so weak that an engineer was able to put his hand right through the steel.

The city was able to take the action it did at 5 Summit through an ordinance adopted last November. That measure did a number of things, including giving the city the power to take building owners to court if they didn't repair and maintain their parking garages. In this case, the inspection and subsequent closing of the garage came after the city issued the building management a summons.

The parking garage collapse at the 18-story Prospect Towers on July 16, 2010, occurred when a 20-foot-long steel and plexiglass canopy near the building's entrance fell and two floors of the garage caved in. It was amazing and fortunate that no one was injured. Still, more than 300 residents were displaced for months, not moving back in until December of that year.

That collapse spurred the city to have owners routinely inspect their parking garages. Not surprisingly, some owners complained about the cost, but the case at hand proves the city was right. Its methods have closed an unsound garage until it can be repaired. That is an inconvenience, to be sure, to employees and customers of 5 Summit Ave., but another garage collapse would be much worse.

Original post:
The Record: Structural integrity