shopping mall roof collapse - who's liable

[dave_k]

Last Saturday afternoon the roof collapsed in a shopping mall in Elliot lake Ontario and it's creating a lot of controversy. Elliot lake is a semi remote mining town in Northern Ontario. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/...questions.html

The mall was a 2 storey structure with parking on the roof. (I for one can't understand the concept of rooftop parking in an area that is surrounded by a bazillion miles of forest) It had a history of maintenance complaints, mostly revolving around water leaking from the rooftop parkade.

The accident that happened on Saturday was a catastrophic, sudden collapse in the area of an escalator that left the building in a state that the entire building was in danger of collapse.

I've done a lot of construction work and maintenance on shopping malls and over the last 20 years downtown malls have been suffering financially at the expense of suburban malls and big box stores. Every city and town of any size has one and the work I've done in those malls is usually decommissioning stores or quoting base building work that I never get because I'm too expensive.

They all have maintenance problems, they were all built between 1970 and the early 80's, they are all worth 20% of their construction value and they all have cheap owners who can't run them at a profit and maintain them.

The townspeople are angry with the owner and blame him for the death of two people, a criminal investigation has started and a class action law suit has been filed and the owner is afraid to come to town because of death threats against him. It's become a bit of a torch and pitchfork kind of situation with the townspeople blaming the owner, building inspectors, engineers, politicians, the media and EMS/ SAR for the tragedy.

In this particular mall there have been 4 BI's and an structural survey by an engineering firm in the last 2 years but it's not said what they were looking at. A mall is a big building. The landlord says he spent $2m in repairs on the building which is only worth $6M, contractor dispute that saying that no one would work on

In my opinion this is a time bomb. These buildings are aging, there's no money for the landlord to fix them or even pay for comprehensive engineering surveys (although I'm sure insurers are going to change that!!), to ask the municipal building department to inspect them means more tax dollars, THAT will never fly. In this community of 11,000 people the mall employed 300+ people so losing it is a major blow to the economy. These buildings just seem like a lose - lose proposition.

it's going to be an interesting one to watch and see where the sh!t that's going through the fan sticks.

[dave_k]

So now the dance begins. The Ministry of Labour(province) has just denied any responsibility even though they were called in to inspect 6 time, they say it's the municipalities responsibility (correctly IMO) to police building standards.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...06/?cmpid=rss1

[MarkMc]

"Elliot lake is a semi remote mining town in Northern Ontario."

Query - isn't it just a bit west of Ottawa closer to the big lake rather than the big bay?

[dave_k]

No mark, It's near the north shore of Lake Huron between Sudbury and Sault Ste Marie. It's an old Uranium mining town.

[MarkMc]

Just wondering about where that line of N/S is. Anything above Markham [what else] is northern Ont? Or is there a northern [middle] and extreme northern? Just wondering as in my last visit to Thunder Bay most of the pop of Ont was south [and east] and most of the land was N.

[Stacey]

We have a similar problem here. The replacement value of the malls is lower than the cost to construct a new one. So few new malls are constructed. The old malls are patched together and are in bad shape same as many of our commercial buildings. Many of our building owners are in foreign countries or down in the States. So they just hire the cheapest handyman and refuse to pull permits for any work as long as they don't get caught.

I don't believe the government has any liability in your case. The owner should be fully responsible. Just my opinion.

[swbuilder]

Just wondering about where that line of N/S is. Anything above Markham [what else] is northern Ont? Or is there a northern [middle] and extreme northern? Just wondering as in my last visit to Thunder Bay most of the pop of Ont was south [and east] and most of the land was N.

Yeah, T'under Bay as my gramps use to call it is way north of Elliot Lake. Most of the population of Canada is within 100 miles of the border I thought i had heard once.

[dave_k]

Just wondering about where that line of N/S is. Anything above Markham [what else] is northern Ont? Or is there a northern [middle] and extreme northern? Just wondering as in my last visit to Thunder Bay most of the pop of Ont was south [and east] and most of the land was N.

Northern Ontario is unofficially everything above a line running through Parry Sound, Algonquin Park and Petawawa. It is kinda relative Sudbury is pretty far north to me but pretty far south for someone in Moosonee

[rogerg]

My grandparents used to live in NorthBay and justas you entered the city limits there used be a very big archway across the road saying "Gateway to the North".
I always figured evrything north of NorthBay was northern Ontario and south of that was southern Ontario because of that sign.

roger

[David Meiland]

Listening to CBC today... said there is now a criminal investigation into the collapse.

[Kent Brobeck]

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families.

It would seem to me the insurance companies are the answer to this problem. If they did yearly inspections of their commercial real estate clients and demanded proper repairs this would at least draw attention to the problem. Link their findings to the local government occupancy permitting office and it my save lives. If their not safe they need to be closed. The insurance companies have very deep pockets.

[dave_k]

Listening to CBC today... said there is now a criminal investigation into the collapse.

Most likely because at least one of the 2 women killed were working at the time. That turns any lack of maintenance to the building from a simple liability matter to criminal negligence causing death. I suspect there is going to be a lot of activity fixing up, tearing down or changing the occupancy of shopping malls in the wake of this.

The whole story will come out eventually. On one hand I feel kinda sorry for the owner. To be in a situation where a building needs millions of dollars in repairs and not having the money to do them and at the same time how do you pay the mortgage if you do the responsible thing and shut down?

It's like depending on a vehicle that need brakes to get to work and needing the job to get your brakes repaired.

I heard the owner approached the city to buy a vacant lot to get the parking off the roof and the city wanted more than he could afford for it. There are bylaws that you can't operate a shopping center without parking so again he's between a rock and a hard place.

Of course we could find out he had wads of dough to fix the place up but just didn't.

[dave_k]

The insurance companies have very deep pockets.

They do and they don't like exposure to risk. They don't do anything for free though so this may just be the straw that breaks the camels back.

I've been involved in downtown development for a long time. There's always been a chicken and egg relationship between downtown decay and shopping. if you don't have shopping you can't attract residents to the core. if there aren't any residents there isn't a market for shopping. If there aren't any residents downtown then you get a lot more crime and no one wants to live there or open shops there.

here in London we kinda turned the tide on urban decay by turning the big downtown shopping center to office and educational space, built a new market and built a lot of high rise condo's and apartments. I said kinda because it's abit of a losing battle right now with a big surge in druggies and homeless since the recession.

[David Meiland]

In general, a lot of light commercial stuff looks to me like it's semi-disposable, designed to last 25 years or something like that before it's sorely in need to rehab or demo. That suits investors, I guess, they could give a rat about anything long-term in most cases, but it leaves cities with an endless supply of decaying problems that no one wants to own or pay for.