911 calls released in parking deck collapse

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Crews planned to work through the night to secure a parking deck at SouthPark Towers office complex that collapsed early Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday afternoon, police released the first calls to 911.

Caller: “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Dispatcher: Are you able to tell if anyone is under there?”
Caller: “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anybody under the second floor.”

AirStar

Images from the scene

No one was hurt in the collapse.

Most of the cars that were trapped in the deck were removed by Tuesday night. The car owners were expected to be notified Wednesday morning.

The first 911 call came in at 8:22 a.m. Tuesday at the parking deck located at 6100 Fairview Road.

Firefighters described it as a pancake collapse. The fourth floor of the parking deck collapsed on the third, which collapsed on the second. It brought down the entire concrete slab in one piece.

"All of sudden the slab of concrete just dropped," said witness Grayland Rodriquez. "It was like someone cut it. You could hear it hit the second floor."

Officials said no cars were parked in the area that collapsed. About 150 cars were in the parking deck, but only one or two had minor damage.

One structural engineer familiar with the history of the deck said in his initial inspection the deck has a very good design with a good safety features, and he is "quite puzzled" by what happened.

The parking deck was built in 1987.

CB Richard Ellis, the property manager for 6100 Fairview, released a statement saying, “We are working closely with local authorities to assess the structural condition of the parking facility adjacent to 6100 Fairview. We are fully committed to identifying the cause of this morning’s incident and will take appropriate action when all the facts are known.”

For those working and living around the South Park Mall, the sights and sounds were eerily familiar to the mall parking deck collapse last December.

"I think it's very rare," said Dr. David Young, chairman of the department of civil engineering at UNC-Charlotte.

Young has investigated structural failures through the years and says it's important to distinguish what appears to have happened on Tuesday with the panels collapsing, and what happened at SouthPark Mall. He said the cases are very different.

"Because the one that happened back in December was an extreme case where a heavy vehicle at a high speed applied an extreme load and damaged that structure," Young said.

The only similarity, he says, is that both decks were built with pre-cast concrete panels. They're poured in a fabrication plant somewhere else, then hauled in and secured among a system of columns and beams.

Young's most educated guess for what went wrong on Tuesday is, "Probably a flaw in the connections."

On Tuesday, the section of the deck fell at a time when many people were arriving for work at banking, insurance and other companies in the nearby office building. People working in those offices reported hearing a rumbling sound as the cement and metal caved in.

Dave Pollack said he had parked on the lowest level, and was sitting in his car listening to the radio when he heard a loud rumbling sound. He told WCNC that he saw trees shaking and debris falling around him.

"If it had come all the way down to the first level, it probably would have just missed me," Pollack said.

(WCNC's Melissa Martin, Mark Boone and Ann Sheridan contributed to this report.)