Fatal New York garage collapse prompts city’s closure of four at-risk structures

Four New York City parking garages were ordered emptied last week amid inspections prompted by a deadly garage collapse that killed one person and injured five.

The four parking garages – two each in Manhattan and Brooklyn – were determined to have “deteriorated to the point where they were now posing an immediate threat to public safety”, said the city’s buildings department spokesperson, the New York Times reported.

One garage in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood received a “full vacate” order for the entire building after city officials found that the two-story parking facility was in a state of “severe disrepair”.

At a separate garage beneath a 25-story apartment building in Manhattan’s Battery Park City neighborhood, fewer than two miles from the site of last month’s collapse, officials found that concrete was deteriorated and “extensively corroded”.

City officials mandated that the building’s owners evacuate 60% of the structure and create a protective pathway for each of the cars in the rest of the garage.

Owners from both buildings were ordered to retain a professional engineer who could completely evaluate the garages’ structural integrities.

The remaining two buildings that received vacate orders were in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhoods, where inspectors noted severe deterioration of the buildings’ beams and structural support.

The announcement of the parking garages’ evacuation came as family and friends gathered for the funeral of Willis Moore, the longtime parking garage manager who was killed in last week’s collapse, ABC 7 New York reported.

City officials announced after the collapse that they had launched an investigation into a number of parking garages, identifying at least 61 with severe violations.

It’s possible similar investigations aimed at public parking garages in places outside New York City could generate similar findings. Breakdown of a parking garage’s concrete reportedly factored into the 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex in Surfside, Florida, which killed 98 people.

The lower Manhattan garage that collapsed and left Moore dead had multiple building code violations involving loose or cracked concrete, with some of the transgressions dating back to 2003.

One garage employee who was rescued during the collapse told local reporters that he had seen long cracks in the building’s concrete and that others tried to warn the facility’s owners about the issue.