the rubble of a New York City parking garage
“Right now we’re transitioning to how we safely take down that building," Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said at a news conference, a day after the multilevel parking lot collapsed just as a stream of customers were returning from work to retrieve their cars. Officials said recovery efforts were made more difficult by the possibility that ongoing work could further destabilize the structure and make it more difficult to retrieve the victim.
“There’s an investigation into exactly what happened here and making sure there’s something we could put in place to prevent something like this from happening,” Mayor Eric Adams said. The Building Department said that in 2009, the garage's owners had been cited for failing to maintain the building because of cracks and defects in concrete. Officials ordered the building owner to hire a professional engineer and correct the violations. The owners began complying in January 2010 and filed applications to make structural repairs and install 34 auto lifts in the building.
“We did not want to send people inside there. We couldn’t even send a cadaver dog in there because that cadaver dog would have gone in there and could have potentially had a collapse and harmed someone,” Adams said.allow his Police Department to use the robotic canines“If we didn’t have that robotic dog we would have placed those firefighters in jeopardy. That’s how we found the person who’s still there,” he said.