The Davenport Apartment Collapse

 

Around 5 PM on Sunday evening, May 28, if you had been standing near the corner of West 4th and Main Streets in downtown Davenport, Iowa, you would have seen The Davenport apartment building yield up about a third of its facade to gravity.  With a loud rumble and a cloud of dust, more than a dozen apartments in the building collapsed, taking three lives and trapping Quanishia Berry in her fourth-story apartment for over twenty-four hours before she was rescued.  Like many engineering disasters, this one was the outcome of a series of actions, or inactions, that could have prevented it.  But now that it's too late for the victims, we can at least learn something from the sequence of events that preceded the tragedy.

 

The Davenport was built in 1907 and at six stories, was probably one of the most prominent structures in the city at that time.  The residents living in it just before the collapse complained of odd creaking noises, cracks in the floor underneath carpets, and window frames pulling away from walls. 

 

The Davenport's owner, Andrew Wold, paid a structural engineer in February to conduct an inspection of the building.  The engineer's report stated that although bricks in the facade were cracked, the flaws were not an "imminent threat to the building or its residents."  In later reports, the last one dated four days before the collapse, the same engineer said that now, several patches of bricks "appear ready to fall imminently, which may create a safety hazard to cars or passersby."  Evidently, a portion of a load-bearing wall behind the brick facade had collapsed, transferring loads onto the facade itself, which was not intended to carry such loads.  This would explain the bulging and other issues noted by the residents.

 

Some residents became so alarmed by the deterioration that they broke their lease and moved out before the collapse.  But others took the word of the landlord that there was no immediate danger. 

 

It is always a judgment call to determine when a building's condition is so bad that it must be evacuated.  Wold had obtained estimates for shoring and supporting parts of the building, but at $50,000 he regarded them as too costly.  The owner of the masonry repair service who provided the quote said that he wouldn't allow his workers on the site without such repairs.  So here was a technically competent person saying he wouldn't even let his employees near a place where residents were living twenty-four hours a day. 

 

How could things have gone differently?  There is evidence that Trishna Pradhan, the city's chief building official, thinks she might have been able to prevent the tragedy by issuing an evacuation order, something she was presumably authorized to do.  The evidence is that a few days after the collapse, she resigned her position.  Another official gave the reason for her resignation as having "wrongly categorized an inspection of the building."  While orders to evacuate a structure immediately are serious things and involve potential legal liability, failing to issue such an order can have worse consequences, as it did in this case. 

 

A building is an extremely complicated structure, and predicting down to the minute when something as large as The Davenport will collapse is essentially impossible.  But when large cracks appear in significant places and the facade begins to bulge visibly, even the average non-technical person would agree that something bad may be about to happen. 

 

One article on the collapse interviewed engineers who cite modern technologies such as vibration sensors that can detect abnormal shifts and movements that occur before serious structural failures.  These can be installed in suspect structures and monitored, but then the question becomes, "How much movement is too much?"  These methods are still experimental, and the expense of installing and monitoring them is one more reason to simply leave things as they are.

 

And that was the main sin of omission committed here.  No one wanted to be the person who stuck his or her neck out and said, "Okay, this place is about to fall down, and we need to get the residents out before it does."  Only a few occupants made this decision on their own, which is not to blame the ones who stayed.  After all, they were told that there was no imminent danger, and up to 5 PM on May 28, that statement was correct, depending on how you define "imminent." 

 

That word did come up in the engineering report four days before the collapse, and should have motivated someone—the landlord, the city—to act.  But yet another decision point was passed, and events moved on to their tragic conclusion.

 

Whoever takes over from Trishna Pradhan as chief building official is going to be a lot more careful about classifying the results of building inspections in the future, one would hope.  And as the technology for sensing vibration in buildings gets cheaper and more available, it might be a good thing if buildings with structural problems were required to have such sensors installed.  The most valuable thing about that would be that we could get lots of data from normal wear and tear, and could get a better idea about what happens with regard to vibrations as a building gets closer to falling down.  Electronic infrastructure sensors like these are available for new buildings, but it would be a challenge to install them in old structures, although not impossible.

 

I can't close this blog without remarking on the likely class of residents who occupied The Davenport in its final days, and whether their complaints might have received more attention if they had been, frankly, richer.  But rich people don't live in 116-year-old run-down buildings in the middle of deteriorated city centers.  Just this morning I was reading in the Old Testament book of Proverbs, and came across one that seems to sum up what happened here:  "The poor man utters supplications, but the rich man answers roughly."  Next time, the rich man needs to listen more carefully, and take more thought for the safety of his fellow human beings.

 

Sources:  I referred to the AP article "Many warnings before collapse" at https://apnews.com/article/iowa-davenport-building-collapse-621844c0d6c206ced4639ddcf443eb80 and the Wikipedia article "Davenport apartment collapse."  The Proverbs verse is Prov. 18:23 from the New American Standard Bible.