You’re seriously stretching with this. Basically you’re saying firemen are stupid. This isn’t an emergency evacuation. It’s a building search. if a door sticks you bring a crow bar. I really don’t see your point at all on this.
Well they could dangle the old coot off a crane, or… and I’m just throwing this out in case fireman aren’t as stupid as you make them out to be… they don’t go where they didn’t go in their search of the building because it was dangerous.
They already did what you’re suggesting they shouldn’t. A clear indication the building was safe enough to walk through. I’m suggesting… no, I’m saying outright that the excuse not to include the pet owners was based on a lie and if not it was a flagrant disregard for life…
I could be wrong and feel free to correct me. The asked for a review of damage they were seeing and/or preparing for the upcoming certification which is not something you engage in a week before it’s due.
Smaller municipalities (or no municipalities) would be handled by the country engineer. It might be possible that a county is so devoid of people that there isn’t much budget for an engineer and in such a case I can see your point. But I would expect them to combine with another county in such cases.
Follow-up: Crestview Tower’s residents today were given a chance to go in for a whole 15 minutes, one person per unit, escorted, to get anything important and hand-portable that might have been left behind. It helps that they were given an hour or two last week, and that Crestview is still standing and just unfit for habitation rather than actively falling down.
Not at all! Seriously, what’s stupid about using an ax to get through a door? That’s why they have those tools available on their vehicles.
When a building shift and doors are wedged shut getting them open by use of brute human strength may not be possible. Crowbars might not work either. Hence, use an ax. It’s quite logical. The right tool for the job.
Describing a grieving, traumatized woman as an “old coot” pretty much reveals what sort of person you are.
I don’t know exactly where they did or didn’t go in what was left of the building and you don’t either. We don’t know if the apartment in question was safe for a human being to enter or not.
I’m saying you have a distorted view of the situation and I trust those on the ground far more than someone engaged in armchair quarterbacking like we are.
You’re also ignoring that the building continued to shift and deteriorate after the initial collapse so that portions that were relatively safe to enter the night of the initial collapse became less and less safe as the days went by. There were days where a shift of 6-12 inches in floors and columns was reported - that can not have helped the stability of the standing portion.
What was safe the morning after may have been highly risky a week later.
Except the Crestview apartments missed their 40th certification deadlines entirely and it was ignored until South Champlain collapsed, whereupon one look at the delinquent report (which was done late to begin with) prompted the authorities to evacuate THAT building. Clearly oversight was minimal to none-existent and enforcement incredibly lax.
The South Champlain board COULD have waited until this year to start the process - this year is when the building turned 40 - but they started it two years before they were required to do so. So no, they didn’t start a week before the report was due, they started two entire years before they were required to begin. The pity is that it made no difference in the end.
You’re the one posting about an axe as if it had any bearing on the search. crowbar, ax, 8 lb sledge hammer, what difference does it make? You made it an issue that firemen rescue people going down stairs and mentioned an ax as if these were problematic. What is your POINT?
It was sarcasm. I’m the kind of person who challenges authorities when they make contradicting statements. And I’m one of the few people in this thread who supported a reasonable request made by the pet owner.
Again, you’re just creating a straw-man for the sake of argument because you can’t justify your position that it was dangerous. According to all accounts they did a thorough search of the building and you have no reasoned response why they couldn’t include the owners.
You have a weird-ass reading of my statements. Wow, you’re really reaching for something to disagree about, aren’t you?
You should have made that more clear, because sarcasm often doesn’t come across in text. Or it wasn’t sarcasm and you’re backpedaling. I really can’t tell at this point.
Since I’m NOT a fireman, rescue expert, first responder, engineer, or the like I don’t know why you’d expect me to have some in-depth expert knowledge. As I have said multiple times, I expect those on site, particularly those with a professional background related to such circumstance, to have far more knowledge of what is and isn’t safe than I would. I expect engineers and first responders would have a better grasp of what is and isn’t safe than I would even if I was on site. Which I’m not.
The first night they went through the building to evacuate people in danger. The point was to get people OUT of the building, not bring them back in. Those who were holding their pets were able to bring them along during the rescue. That was, I suppose, (based on the actions of professionals) a reasonable course of action. Days later after the building has shifted repeatedly? Not so much. And no, I don’t think it’s reasonable to risk humans lives for one cat. You are free to differ in that opinion.
For the record, I have been owned by cats in the past. I had a great deal of affection for them. I still would not have asked another human being to risk their life to rescue one of them from a half-collapsed building.
I think everything that people want to say about rescuing pets in the about-to-be-demolished-building has been said, and people are now going around in circles. Please drop the topic.
I’ll be honest, if one pet could be found I’m glad it was Binx. She was apparently in apartment 904 which was one of the ones sheared in half, and of the three family members who were inside, the father is still missing and the mother and daughter are still hospitalized. Apparently, the cat belonged to the 16 year old daughter who fell 4 stories and broke her femur. Her mother was apparently rescued from the rubble and was intubated but is now slowly recovering. Of all the survivors who could use a support animal, this girl who was severely injured and most likely lost her father and whose mother was even more seriously injured would be at the top of my list.
There are YouTube videos by people purporting to be engineers who have sort of done that already in the abstract.
Now that I’ve watched the videos I can see concrete damage in the visit to 611 video, and sure enough, there are puddles of water in the basement, including near parking spot 78 which has been noted as a problem spot.
The building was lovely in a cosmetic sense. It may have had a pretty veneer over fatal rot.
There’s something very touching about that video. Most of what we’ve seen so far were security-cam videos of the building collapse from a distance, and stories about the casualties, which created a sort of abstract understanding of what had happened. That video somehow made the tragedy a lot more real and emotional.