California balcony collapse kills six people at a birthday party

[puzzld]

An apartment balcony collapsed in California early this morning, killing five people and injuring eight others, with Irish citizens among the victims, authorities said.

The accident was reported at 12:41 a.m., in the 2000 block of Kittredge Street in Berkeley, police said in a news release. The balcony that collapsed is located on the fourth floor.

?My heart goes out to the families and loved ones of the deceased and those who have been injured in this appalling accident,? Ireland?s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Charlie Flanagan said in the statement.

Those injured were taken to two area hospitals.

Authorities are working with building inspectors to figure out what caused the collapse, police said.

The apartment building is located less than two blocks from the University of California-Berkeley campus.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-califo...ry?id=31795725

[Boston Babe 73]

They're saying that they're all Irish Nationals. This is heartbreaking. I'd like to know how big the balcony was.

[puzzld]

They're saying that they're all Irish Nationals. This is heartbreaking. I'd like to know how big the balcony was.

Doesn't look all that big.

[hazydaze]

Thats a crazy high number of people killed/injured by 1 small balcony.

[Boston Babe 73]

Doesn't look all that big.

Ahhhhh. Yeah. Thirteen people on that little thing was NOT a bright idea. Seems like every few years this same scenario happens with teens or college students crowding on to a balcony during a party and BOOM. Terrible.

[SuchAClassicGirl]

Ahhhhh. Yeah. Thirteen people on that little thing was NOT a bright idea. Seems like every few years this same scenario happens with teens or college students crowding on to a balcony during a party and BOOM. Terrible.

This.

[morbid1]

These are pretty small balconies -- 10 plus seems like a lot, but there are now reports out that the balconies were deemed unsafe before the accident this morning. Very sad for all involved.

[Boston Babe 73]

Unsafe or not, if you give a conservative average weight of 150lbs per person, you're looking at a literal ton of weight on that balcony. Even a balcony deemed safe can only hold so much.

[puzzld]

An apartment balcony collapsed during a birthday party attended by Irish students in the California city of Berkeley early Tuesday, killing six of the 13 people who fell from the fourth-floor structure, officials said. http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/16/us/cal...pse/index.html
video http://abc7news.com/news/5-dead-8-in...rkeley/787649/

[puzzld]

The deadly collapse of a Berkeley apartment balcony early Tuesday morning resulted from water rotting the wood that held it to the building, not from the deck being overloaded, a structural engineer said Tuesday.

The deck showed a "deficiency in the design" said Tony Childress, owner of Texas-based Childress Engineering Services. He questioned the entire deck connection to the residential apartment building at 2020 Kittredge St.

Six people died, and seven others were seriously injured when the balcony broke early Tuesday morning.

Such accidents are not uncommon; numerous people were injured in a collapse in San Francisco in January and another in Oakland in September. Others have been reported across the country in the past few years.


Balcony collapses are "100 percent avoidable," said a lawyer who has represented victims.

"Due to the complete inadequacy of ... inspections around the Bay Area, you literally have ticking time bombs," said Niall McCarthy, a Burlingame lawyer who has represented victims in five Bay Area balcony collapses. "?

"Balcony maintenance is a life-and-death issue," he said. "If your plumbing goes out, you have a headache and water in your building. If you don't maintain a balcony, somebody dies."

Childress said it was clear that water had reached the wood. "You can see the rotting," he said, after reviewing detailed photos of the damage with others in his failure-analysis firm at the request of the Bay Area News Group.

"This is a situation where a deficiency in the design allowed for moisture to seep in," he said. Childress' conclusion also raises questions about the city's review of the plans and construction.

City officials on Tuesday said it was too early in the collapse investigation to discuss its cause. The 176-unit building's planning documents were in storage and were not immediately available.

Building inspection reports from 2005-06, the years during which it was built, make no reference to balconies.

Neither the company that owns the $65 million building nor the one that manages it would discuss what might have caused the collapse Tuesday.

The 1998 California building standards in effect when the building was designed required the balcony to support 60 pounds per square foot, Childress said.

Under that standard, the roughly 50-square-foot balcony could have held about 3,000 pounds. Thirteen people, averaging 200 pounds each, standing on it at the same time would have added up to 2,600 pounds.

A new state building code effective Jan. 1, 2008, increased the load requirements for such an apartment building to 100 pounds per square foot, said Childress Engineering code consultant Ray Kirby.

Childress said the deck would not have been overloaded had it been filled shoulder-to-shoulder with people. The water intrusion doomed it, he said.

"The water infiltrated from the top down, and the wood snapped from the top down," the structural engineer said.

The building, called Library Gardens, is managed by South Carolina-based Greystar, a property management, real estate development and construction company.

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Greystar said, "The safety of our residents is our highest priority, and we will be working with an independent structural engineer and local authorities to determine the cause of the accident."

When the balcony broke, it swung down against the building, hanging there like a hinge as the partygoers slipped off to the street below.

It later broke loose, falling on the next deck below, Childress said. Kirby called it a "progressive collapse."

"I don't like the way the steel frame design looks and how it was connected," Childress said.

To prevent the water infiltration, he said, flashing would need to go back several feet inside the wood structure.

Although the building is relatively new, a leak can lead to dry rot in 30 months or less, he said.

Balcony and deck collapses are not uncommon across the United States, with many attributed to poor maintenance, dry rot or termite damage combined with heavy loading.

"Balconies normally don't collapse on their own," said Robert Clayton, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents five students injured in a balcony collapse in Isla Vista next to the UC Santa Barbara campus in 2013.

"It's usually the result of neglect," he said.

That same year, a balcony collapsed during a July 4 party in Neptune Beach, Florida, triggering lawsuits over its condition.

In February of this year, a jury in Montgomery, Alabama, awarded nearly $25 million to eight people injured in a 2012 balcony collapse during a graduation party.

A San Francisco attorney said he was struck by how new the building is.

"It is shocking that it failed so quickly. You would expect to see something like that with much older buildings," said Todd Walburg, a lawyer with Lieff Cabraser in San Francisco, which has represented victims in collapses.

Two other deck accidents within the past year injured Bay Area residents.

On Jan. 25, three people were seriously injured when a railing, later determined to be rotted, gave way at a San Francisco residence. The victims fell 20 feet.

And nine people were injured, three critically, in September when a deck collapsed at an East Oakland house.

That deck simply pulled away from the house and flipped over. A city building chief later said the deck may have pulled away from the house because it was too weakly attached.
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_2...lcony-collapse

[songbirdsong]

Ugh, I hate reading about accidents that happen during/en route to birthday parties and weddings and shit. Obviously the victims get the worst of it, but sheesh. I would feel so terrible and guilty, even though the host couldn't have prevented this from happening.

[Olivia]

Ashley Donohoe, 22, Oliva Burke, 21, Eoghan Culligan, 21, Niccolai Schuster, 21, Lorcan Miller, 21, and 21-year-old Eimear Walsh were identified as the victims
Many of the seven injured have critical, life-threatening wounds following the fourth-floor balcony collapse in the early hours of Tuesday
Department of Foreign Affairs said the people who died were in their twenties and in the U.S. on J1 working visas
There were 12-14 people on the balcony when it collapsed during the party, according to reports
Police received a number of noise complaints about a large party in the apartment shortly before midnight on Tuesday


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz3dI583Vhr
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[Olivia]

http://mydeathspace.com/article/2015...birthday_party