Park at your own risk: Collapses continue as aging garages, decks often go unchecked

(InvestigateTV) — Even with the severe storms that had been raging throughout the late-summer evening, Catherine Cruz said there was no mistaking the window-rattling ‘boom’ for thunder.

As smoke began to billow past the Northeast Ohio apartment balconies and the sound of sirens grew louder, Cruz said the source of the commotion was also unmistakable as she and her neighbors peered over their railings.

The complex’s parking garage had collapsed.

While Cruz and her neighbors looked on, first responders rushed to put out a resulting vehicle fire and rescue the occupants of vehicles trapped under the debris.

“All we could do was wait and see what was going to happen,” Cruz said.

While no human lives were lost, two people were injured and dozens of vehicles were ultimately destroyed — including Cruz’s — in the August 2023 incident.

Through a cruel twist of circumstance, Cruz said her car was not actually damaged in the initial collapse, but when crews purposefully collapsed some of the structure still standing for safety reasons.

She said she tried to get it out but was not allowed near it and had to watch from her balcony as concrete and steel crushed the car for which she only had liability insurance and had just finished paying off.

“I made the final payment on that car a week before this collapse,” she said, “which is why I tried so hard to get it out because I had been paying on it for some time. And I had just made the final payment, you know, a week prior.”

In the wake of the collapse, many tenants expressed a lack of surprise that the Ohio garage came down, several telling local news outlets they had observed rusting beams and chunks of concrete falling from above.

Cruz said she too had seen what she thinks were obvious signs of deterioration.

Following the collapse, the property owners denied the failure was caused by lack of maintenance.

The complex has received dozens of building code violations over the last few years and since the collapse.

While Ohio state code mandates some routine safety inspections for things such as elevators and fire-escapes, there is no regulatory requirement that parking structures be evaluated once construction is complete — a trait shared by almost every other state in the country.

InvestigateTV found only a handful of major cities nationwide have such mandates, and even those that do sometimes only require inspections of garages that are attached to certain kinds of buildings or once the structure is more than a decade old.

In the absence of regulation, some garages are still inspected thanks to industry best practices or the conditions of liability insurance coverage, but many experts say the neglect they regularly observe suggests a lack of motivation for many owners.

“I don’t park in certain parking structures, simple as that,” said Jerry Bronstrup, a California contractor who specializes in structural and foundation repair.

After finding a spot, he said if he looks up and sees water dripping from the ceiling, long parallel cracks or chunks of missing concrete, he’s unlikely to stay.

“If I see the lack of maintenance, I don’t park in it.”

Built to last, but maintenance required

From multi-level decks spanning a city block to just a couple floors underground, parking structures, like any other building, are constructed according to established building codes.

While code details vary by jurisdiction, most are based on internationally-accepted templates that outline design and materials standards. They also require inspections by building officials throughout the construction process to ensure structural stability.

Given the unique kinds of stress put on parking structures, things can quickly start to go south even if built perfectly to code.

“Structural engineers designing parking structures, they build to a safety factor, usually times two, but that safety factor of design-times-two for a parking structure is based upon perfect conditions,” Bronstrup said.

By design, parking garages and decks are subjected to immense payloads from the vehicles utilizing them — weight that often fluctuates daily or even hourly — but the real enemy, Bronstrup explained, is water.

Road salts and deicing agents used in cold climates, salty ocean air in coastal regions, industrial pollution and even just exhaust from idling vehicles weakens concrete, he said. These environmental stressors cause cracks and other breakdowns which, if not repaired, can expose the steel reinforcing the concrete to corrosion-causing moisture.

“Most concrete structures are not maintained to be able to keep the water from impregnating or embedding into the concrete, attacking the steel,” Bronstrup said.

“Once it gets worse, what happens is the concrete starts to delaminate from the steel, and that concrete starts to fall and fail. It may crack and only separate in the beginning but eventually pieces fall.”

Bronstrup, whose company, Foundation Technology, provides structural repair services for all kinds of buildings, said ultimately that the consequences can be catastrophic.

“In the worst case, the concrete structure itself, the floor, fails.”

‘Major structural damage’

In June 2021, 98 people were killed and 11 more injured when a 13-story condominium building in Surfside, Florida collapsed.

Early findings from a federal investigation into the tragedy support the hypothesis that the collapse was caused by the structural failure of the building’s ground-floor swimming pool deck, which was built on top of the parking garage.

The investigation confirmed eyewitness reports that the pool deck collapsed into the garage several minutes before the rest of the building fell, and investigators point to signs of deterioration and corrosion in the parking garage as supporting evidence for their leading premise.

The condominium building was just shy of its 40th birthday, the age that county building codes at the time would have required its first mandatory building inspection since it was built.

The condominium complex’s governing board knew that required inspection was coming — in 2018 the board hired an engineering firm to evaluate the condition of the structure.

Consultants found significant issues throughout the building, but noted “major structural damage” to the concrete slab between the pool deck and the garage, as well as “signs of distress/fatigue” in the garage itself.

After the collapse, residents reported they had complained for years about frequent flooding and large cracks in the garage, and the city revealed concerns about the garage’s roof dating back to 1996.

Two months before the collapse, building leadership notified residents that the deterioration of the concrete in the building was getting worse, and would cost $15 million to remediate.

“Everyone thinks that you build with concrete, it’s gonna last forever; where, actually, no, that’s not the truth. Concrete does have to be maintained,” Bronstrup said.

And without a strong enough incentive to stay on top of that maintenance, he said many owners choose to put that maintenance off.

“People don’t spend the money. They just won’t do it, they don’t see the value in it,” he said. “It’s like when you go to the doctor and the doctor says you need to lose some weight or you need to go on a diet, or you need to change your diet, you need to stop smoking. Do people do that? No, they don’t. They just continue.”

Industry carrots and a handful of sticks

There are owners of parking structures who are proactive — such as those who seek accreditation through the International Parking & Mobility Institute, which requires Accredited Parking Organizations to complete annual walk-through inspections as well as periodic full-engineering inspections to maintain the credential.

Other industry organizations, such as the American Concrete Institute, National Parking Association and American Society of Civil Engineers all encourage owners to have their structures inspected every few years. They also offer guidance on what those inspections should include to not only keep people safe but prolong the life of the asset.

While he wishes all property owners would see the benefits of staying on top of needed maintenance, Bronstrup said he believes that because parking structures are usually open to the public, regulators should be making sure things are safe.

“You should expect that your public officials, especially the ones in building and safety should be paying more attention to the inspection, the maintenance, or repair … to making sure that it’s done,” he said. “I think that’s far more important.”

Some states and cities have adopted the International Building Maintenance Code, an additional set of standards that requires buildings “be maintained in good repair and structurally sound and not pose a threat to public health.”

However, while these codes outline what conditions are considered “safe” or “unsafe” for structures, they don’t prescribe any kind of framework for state or local governments to evaluate them — something the International Code Council, which authors the template codes, has been looking at changing.

In 2018, New York became the first — and remains the only — state to directly mandate routine inspections of parking structures.

In response to a number of collapses upstate, lawmakers initially passed a bill in 2016 that would have required structural inspections of parking garages and decks every five years.

“After a garage collapsed in my area, I was surprised to learn that New York did not require regular structural inspections,” Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo, one of the bill’s sponsors, said.

The bill was ultimately vetoed by then Governor Andrew Cuomo, who instead directed the Department of State to re-work the state code to require inspections, referred to as “condition assessments,” every three years.

New York City was initially exempt from the state law due to the volume of structures in the city, but in 2021 passed a local law requiring parking structures be inspected every six years on a staggered schedule.

Following a Manhattan collapse in April 2023 that killed a construction worker, the city pulled forward the timeline for many structures, requiring all parking garages and decks be inspected initially by Aug. 1, 2024.

After the Surfside collapse, Florida lawmakers passed a law that requires all condominium buildings across the state conduct “milestone” inspections once they reach 30 years old, with those in coastal regions required to begin at 25 years.

The requirement is a stricter version of what Miami-Dade County had in place in 2021, and the county itself upped its requirements to include all buildings of four stories or more, condominium or not, in the wake of the fatal collapse.

“The truth is it unfortunately, it takes a catastrophic event for our regulatory agencies to get off their backside to be able to do something about it,” Bronstrup said.

Because many states delegate building code measures to local governments, InvestigateTV looked at the building oversight regulations in place for the 50 largest metropolitan areas across the country.

Of those, only a handful have dedicated requirements that parking structures be inspected on a routine basis:

• New York City: All parking structures inspected every six years on staggered schedule.
• Minneapolis: Annual inspections required on a tiered basis beginning five years after construction.
• Buffalo: Parking structures must be licensed, and per state law, inspected every three years.
• Kansas City: Inspections required every five years beginning 15 years after construction; inspections of underground structures begin 5 years after construction.
• San Francisco: Inspection required for annual renewal of garage operation permit.
• Cleveland: Inspections required every five years.

Cleveland’s inspection requirement was implemented in February after multiple parking structures in the metropolitan area experienced collapses, including the one in Willowick, where Cruz lived, and requires that all structures receive an initial inspection within a year.

Other cities have regulations that result in some parking structures receiving routine inspections, but not all:

• In Austin, Texas, parking structures connected to hotels, motels and other commercial lodging establishments must be inspected every five years.
• Washington, D.C. requires regular inspection of all aspects, including parking areas, of properties with three or more rental units.
• Jacksonville, Florida — where a parking deck next to a hospital collapsed in September 2023 — follows the Florida mandate for condominium buildings, as does Miami, which extends the requirement to all buildings of four stories or more.
• In Columbus, Ohio, structures in certain downtown areas or of a certain size that are near public sidewalks must have periodic “critical observation” inspections.

Other cities, such as Indianapolis, Detroit and Chicago have rules in place that give building officials the authority to require or conduct periodic inspections of parking structures, but don’t offer a specific timeline.

Many city and state codes do incorporate fire safety standards and inspections established by the National Fire Protection Association, but even that organization has noted the need for standardized structural evaluation assessments to prevent collapses.

“Associations including NFPA and the International Code Council certainly have the ability and expertise within their membership to help facilitate such a program through the effective use of their codes and standards,” Michael Savage, an NFPA technical committee member, said in a quote for a blog post following the Surfside condominium collapse. “A certificate of occupancy only shows that a building meets code and is safe at the single point in time it was inspected. Without an effective assessment and maintenance program, this level of safety may, and in some circumstances does, suffer over time.”

Preventing future catastrophes

Without greater oversight, Bronstrup said he anticipates parking structures will continue to crumble.

“Oh, we’ll see more collapses,” he said, “we’ll see more collapses, there’s no doubt about it.”

He said he is especially concerned about the thousands of concrete behemoths constructed in the 1980s and 1990s that are beginning to approach the end of their useful lives.

“It has to start with a public agency to say, “What are we going to do about it?’” he said.

If public agencies do take a look at these structures, he said, they aren’t likely to be wasting their time.

For example, the city of Santa Monica decided to inspect all city-owned garages after severe concrete cracking was discovered in one structure in 2009.

According to a city staff report, through those inspections the city found problems in six additional parking structures amounting to $3.2 million in repairs.

“These structures have shown signs of structural slab wear and distress due to long-term usage and exposure to the elements,” the staff report noted.

City council members approved the repair project for the garages in 2017, but the parking structure that prompted the review was ultimately found to be beyond useful repair and was demolished to make way for an affordable housing project. City records show maintenance and repair of parking garages has been ongoing and is now a line item the city budget.

Elsewhere in the country, there could be new regulations on the horizon.

Wisconsin State Representative Darrin Madison introduced a bill to mandate parking structures be inspected every five years.

“What this bill does, it [would require] all parking structures to be inspected, whether they be publicly owned or privately owned, on a recurring basis so we can ensure the safety of these structures for the public, and if folks aren’t compliant with that, there are penalties,” he said in an interview with InvestigateTV. “Our overarching goal is to ensure that folks can trust the structures they use.”

The bill has bipartisan support. If passed, Wisconsin would become the second state to require parking structure inspections.

Lupardo, the New York assembly woman, said the roll out of regulations in the Empire State has gone well.

“I have received no negative feedback regarding New York’s implementation of these rules,” she said. “In fact, I’ve heard more about problems being discovered and addressed.”

Lupardo said she couldn’t speculate about whether more states will get on board, but said it is something she would like to see implemented nationwide.

“I do think a national safety standard for parking garage construction and inspection is warranted,” she said.

Dust remains unsettled after collapse

In Willowick, Ohio, where the garage outside Catherine Cruz’s apartment building collapsed last August, the city code requires multi-family residential properties to maintain a license.

Initial approval for such a license requires an inspection by the building inspector but can be renewed “without an investigation” as long as the applicant provides a signed form attesting to compliance with all codes and laws.

The city was already in the midst of prosecuting the property owners of Cruz’s apartment complex for prior code violations when the garage failed, and in the months since has issued additional violation notices over health and safety issues tenants say have gotten worse since the collapse.

Throughout the cleanup, residents have also been largely unable to park near the building, many of them parking across the street at a grocery store.

In December, a 66-year-old man was killed in a hit-and-run when he was hit by an SUV as he was walking from his car to his home in the building.

Cruz said her daughter witnessed the fatal incident.

“He got hit in the street, crossing the street with his groceries to come to the apartment because they have to park across the street at the grocery store now, and he passed away,” she said. “It was it was very sad.”

InvestigateTV reached out to the owners of the apartment complex as well as their attorney — they declined to comment.

Cruz said she and her neighbors are trying to move forward despite the strain of the lingering challenges the collapse has created.

“I’m just really trying to keep my own head up above water,” she said, explaining that the cost of replacing the car she lost because of the collapse has left her with thousands of dollars of unplanned debt.

“I was in a dark place for a long time struggling,” she said, “and it’s a struggle that should not have happened.”

Cruz said she is moving out of the Willowick apartment she’s called home for five years as a result of what she’s gone through but said she hopes if other communities can look at her experience and see what’s at stake, future failures might not happen.

“I really want to prevent people from going through this because this has been what, almost seven months, and I’m still not recovered,” she said. “I’m still trying to put things together and I’ve gone into debt to try to make myself right and make it right. And, you know, it’s important.”

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