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'Catastrophic' damage: Bellevue picking up the pieces after crane collapses downtown
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Rick Schweinhart/Journal
The fallen construction crane
remained sprawled across downtown Bellevue a day after Thursday’s
crash. The accident damaged three buildings, killed a man and closed
108th Avenue Northeast, backing up traffic throughout the day.
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By David A. Grant
Journal Reporter
BELLEVUE — Investigators will probe whether the
relocation of a tower crane from its original base at a downtown
construction site may have caused its collapse Thursday evening,
killing one man in a nearby apartment building and causing millions of
dollars in damage to three buildings.
Killed was Matthew Ammon,
31, a Microsoft employee, who was in his fourth-floor apartment at the
Pinnacle BellCentre complex, across the street from the construction
site.
'Just very fortunate'
Had the crane toppled
earlier, during the workday, the loss might well have been far greater.
"It's just very fortunate that only one life was lost in this whole
incident," one investigator said.
"Damage to the (apartment)
building was catastrophic," Bellevue Fire Chief Mario Trevino said
Friday afternoon as rescue workers in hard hats and dust masks combed
through the debris of a nearby office building to make sure there were
no other victims.
Officials with the state Department of Labor
& Industries said Friday it could take months to complete their
investigation of the collapse, which occurred shortly before 8 p.m.
Thursday at the construction site of Tower 333, a planned office
building at the southwest corner of 108th Avenue Northeast and
Northeast Fourth Street, in the city's financial district.
Surviving a harrowing ride
The
operator of the tower crane, whose name was not available, survived
what must have been a harrowing ride down in his tiny, glass-enclosed
cab that had been perched some 210 feet above the building's
foundation. The crane and horizontal boom are estimated to weigh well
more than 100 tons.
"He's one lucky dude," said bystander Michael Mullally, of Bothell, on Friday. "I bet he'll have a story to tell."
The
operator told rescue personnel he was preparing to shut down for the
night when he heard a crack and the crane went down, said Bruce Kroon,
a Fire Department spokesman. The man was treated for minor injuries
then released from Overlake Hospital.
The crane's tower fell
toward the southeast, landing on a two-story office building called
Plaza 305, causing extensive damage. A pedestrian walkway from the
sidewalk to the first floor of the building, above a parking garage,
kept the tower from crashing to the ground.
In all likelihood,
Plaza 305 will be declared a complete loss and demolished; the building
carries an assessed value of just $1,000 while the property is worth
$3.4 million, according to the King County Assessor's office.
Firefighters rescued the crane operator from the cab, which was stuck 20 to 30 feet above the street.
Police
blockaded 108th between Second and Fourth avenues on Friday. It was
expected to remain closed through the weekend while state Labor and
Industries officials conduct their investigation. Both Second and
Fourth avenues remained open to east-west traffic.
The end of
the crane's horizontal boom, from which a cable and hook transport
cargo, is what slammed into the four-story, 248-unit Pinnacle
BellCentre across 108th Street from the construction site, killing
Ammon and damaging several units.
All 68 apartments in building
A of the four-building complex were "red-tagged," or closed to
residents by city officials, said Carlos Ortiz, senior regional manager
for BRE Properties, which owns Pinnacle BellCentre. Bellevue Fire Chief
Trevino, however, put the number at 25 units, about 30 people who were
out of their homes.
Ortiz said the company will help pay hotel
bills for renters who were displaced after the crane smashed into the
building Thursday night.
The north tower of Civica Office
Commons was the third building damaged by the crane. The end of the
horizontal boom that holds its counterweight crashed into the
eight-story building, which is located south of Plaza 305.
It
left gaping holes in the sixth and seventh stories of the high-end
office building and the siding of three other floors also were damaged,
but there was no structural damage, according to inspectors.
Civica
is home to advertising, financial services, real estate and development
companies. Yellow tape and "Keep Out" signs were posted in a handful of
closed offices on the building's north side. About 20 percent of the
building's offices were closed on Friday.
Tower 333 is owned by
Hines, a large Texas-based developer. The general contractor on the
project is Lease Crutcher Lewis, the same company that earlier this
year completed the new Bellevue City Hall two blocks away.
The
crane's operator was Ness Cranes. KING Television reported the crane is
owned by Morrow Equipment Company LLC, headquartered in Salem, Ore.
One
of the people on the scene after the crane collapse was Guy Conversano,
a structural engineer at DCI Engineers, which is doing the engineering
work at several large construction sites in downtown Bellevue and also
worked on the construction of Civica.
Conversano said Bellevue
officials called him Thursday night to assess the damage at the three
buildings damaged by the crane. He has also been hired by Lease
Crutcher Lewis, the general contractor for Tower 333, to investigate
the cause of the collapse, separate from L&I.
"Three hours
earlier, or if the crane had shifted in a little different direction,
it could have been different," Conversano said.
While Conversano
said it's too early to pinpoint the cause of the collapse, the
investigation will look closely at two aspects: the lower portion of
the tower and the crane's foundation in what eventually will be the
building's underground parking garage.
The foundation will likely draw particular interest in light of the project's history.
What
is now Tower 333 started life as a different project called the
Bellevue Technology Tower by the late Bellevue Developer Eugene
Horbach, who broke ground on his Tech Tower in September 2000.
In
May 2001, however, work was halted on the project, and for years it
languished as a partially finished pit before Hines redesigned it and
work resumed work earlier this year.
But apparently because the
building had been redesigned, the foundation used to support the tower
crane had been moved, a change that may or may not have something to do
with the collapse of the tower crane, Conversano said.
"We're looking at the crane and the foundation. Until we get a little deeper and do some testing we won't know the answer.
"We
think the failure happened in the excavation area somewhere close to
the base but we don't know what the cause is," he said. "It has to have
happened in the tower itself or in the foundation. Those are the two
areas we'll concentrate on."
David Grant can be reached at david.grant@kingcountyjournal.com or 425-453-4237.
Last modified: November 18. 2006 12:00AM
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