In Brooklyn, a three-story building crashed on Wednesday afternoon, injuring one resident inside and leaving a pile of debris scattered across the street. The collapsed building also housed a gym before crumbling down.
Massive collapse
According to Fox News, the incident occurred around 4:30 p.m. at the corner of Court and Union streets located in Carroll Gardens in the tony neighborhood.
For the last 36 years, Body Elite Gym considered the building as its home, and officials said that structure did not have any occupants at the time of the incident.
The Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) reported that the single victim of the crash was a man who was at the time on the second floor of the building and managed to escape with only minor injuries. The man was immediately taken to the New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.
Witnesses observed the New York Police Department with their K9 units investigating the area immediately after the building's collapse.
Allegedly, records show that the building had a brick wall that had a 40-foot bulge with no immediate protection, as reported by Daily Mail.
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Since 2005, the city's Department of Buildings (DOB) had its investigators issue fines to the building's owner at least eight times for large cracks they found across the property.
The latest fine was issued a few weeks ago on June 10, after inspectors discovered three massive openings along a wall and noted the side was at risk when they saw it bulging and slowly disintegrating. Inspectors issued a fine worth $5,000 to the owner in June, which has not yet been paid.
Beautification project
The owner of the gym housed within the building, Robert Alimena, shared her shock of the event and that she was shaking of fear for the potential casualties that could have resulted if the gym was open to the public when it collapsed.
According to The New York Times, Kihyo Park, the building's owner, did not immediately answer phone calls asking for comments on the incident.
On Wednesday, a spokesman for the DOB said their engineers and inspectors are investigating the scene of the incident in Brooklyn.
Alimena noted that Park began repairs on the building just recently to fix the issues revealed by previous inspections. Park told Alimena that the bulge found in the wall was a cosmetic issue and was not a risk to the structure.
The gym owner noted the repairs were only routine work on the building's exterior and revealed he was returning to the city on Thursday to observe and monitor the damage.
A sales agent at Body Elite Gym, Roddy Evans, expressed his surprise of the collapse after saying the project was for the beautification of the establishment and did not touch any structural part of the building.
Evans said, "That's why we're all shocked, because it wasn't structural," noting the repairs to the building. The sales agent was, fortunately, not inside the building when it collapsed.
