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An unsupported two-story wall collapsed at a Bay Ridge worksite on Sunday as the area was hit by gale-force winds.
Hundreds of pounds of cinderblocks plummeted through the roof of the Leading Edge Radiation Oncology Services on Fifth Avenue before 8:45 pm on Feb. 10. The impact blew debris and glass as far as 30 feet away into the busy thoroughfare between 87th and 88th streets.
Fortunately, no one was hurt.
“When I first noticed the wall [under construction] last week, I thought to myself, ‘My God! That doesn’t look safe!” said local resident Joan Macey.
The wall was supposed to be part of a three-story enlargement of the medical office. The lot is owned by Bob Bakalis of Asteria Realty, based in Queens.
The collapse is another chapter in an ill-fated construction project. The site — an eyesore due to unfinished and exposed second- and third-story I-beans since last summer — offered no sign of activity until a few weeks ago, when the cinderblock wall was built.
The original scaffolding, girders and cinderblock work had been done by Queens-based Tres Construction until the company was issued a violation in early January by the Department of Buildings for working with an expired permit.
Bakalis replaced Tres Construction with a new company, Refined Construction and Development, last month. But Bakalis and a Refined foreman told The Brooklyn Paper that the cinderblock wall was a leftover from Tres Construction.
The phone at Tres Construction was disconnected and the company could not be reached.
In the wake of the collapse, Councilman Vincent Gentile (D–Bay Ridge) called again for the city to tighten rules that allow some architects to certify their own designs — as Bakalis’s architect, Gregory G. Georges, did in this case.
It is unclear whether the collapse was caused by any flaw in Georges’s design, but Gentile said the potentially fatal incident provided “another example of why the Buildings Department needs to hire additional inspectors so we can do away with self-certification.”
©2008 The Brooklyn Paper
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