Mayor Eric Adams: I want to really give you an overview of what happened. We had a parking garage here that collapsed. Chief Esposito is the incident commander here and he’s going to give an overview exactly what happened. I’m joined by the City Council member and the borough president that represent this area, as well as the police commissioner exactly to really respond to this incident. At this time we only have one DOA, but I do want to point out that thank God we had the robotic dog that was able to go in the building. Ideally, this is what we talk about, not sending a human being inside an unstable building.
Sadly, we did lose one life. While we continue to search the site, at this time we are hopeful that there are no other people trapped in the structure.
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) April 18, 2023
We were also able to use the technology of a drone to give a real visualization of what is happening in this building. At this time, this building is completely unstable and the chief… We do not want to send in someone until we can make sure the building is shored up, but using the necessary technology, we are able to get a clear view of what’s happening inside the building for the most part, and do whatever we can to see if there are any more victims. Right now, as I indicated, we have one confirmed DOA, and Chief Esposito will give you an overview of what else we have on the ground and what’s taking place. Chief.
John Esposito, Chief of Operations, Fire Department: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon. I’m John Esposito, the chief of operations for the Fire Department. As far as we can tell so far, we have six patients. There were six workers in the building at the time of the collapse. Four of them have been transported to the hospital in stable condition. We have one patient that has died and we have one patient that refused medical attention. This was an extremely dangerous operation for our firefighters. We responded to a call of a collapse in the building. We had firefighters inside the building conducting searches. The building was continuing to collapse. We made the decision to remove all our people from the building.
Our robotics unit happened to be nearby. They were on scene very quickly. We deployed our robot dog into the building, they were able to give us a video inside, and then we were able to fly our drones inside to conduct an assessment and conduct searches. Although we continue to make sure that we have everybody accounted for, at this time, we believe that we have the workers that were in danger in the building all accounted for, all out of the building, and that structure is very unstable. We’ve had some parking garage, we’ve had some of the slabs, a couple of the concrete slab floors collapse, crush some of the cars that are inside, and this will be a prolonged operation. I’m going to pass it on to the police commissioner.
Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell: Hello. At this time we have no reason to believe that this is anything other than a structural collapse. Obviously, that investigation will continue. Our preliminary response centered on making this area safe, that includes traffic control and evacuating the nearby Pace University building, which was deemed unstable at that time. We will continue to work in collaboration with our partners in the Fire Department in this effort.
Acting Commissioner Kazimir Vilenchik, Department of Buildings: Good afternoon. So as indicated, it’s a structural collapse at this moment, and what we observed from the drone deployed and we observed that there are four-story building all the way pancaked, collapsed all the way to the cellar floor. Our engineers deployed and currently checking adjoining buildings and observing footage from drone pictures to identify possible reason for collapse. We are going to continuous review and research property profiles to understand history of the building, certificate of occupancy, and all other records and I will update this information [inaudible].
Mayor Adams: Do you know if there are any active work permits or any violations?
Acting Commissioner Vilenchik: And at this time I should mention also there right now there are some active violation on the building dated back to 2003, but in 2010 was application filed which not indicated violation was corrected, but it was filed. There are some active permits in the building. One of them is related to the electrical work on the premise.
