New York City’s buildings commissioner says his agency is suspending an engineer’s authority to inspect building exteriors after a crucial error led to the partial collapse of an apartment complex in the Bronx’s Morris Heights neighborhood on Monday.
The revelation comes after three witnesses and a government official briefed on the collapse told Gothamist that workers were jackhammering and removing bricks from a ground-floor support column at the seven-story building shortly before the disaster.
Department of Buildings Commissioner James Oddo said the engineer mistakenly deemed a load-bearing column “decorative” in plans filed with the agency in June.
“The engineer failed to recognize a clearly structural column as such, and he can no longer be out there making assessments of the structural integrity of exterior walls of New York’s buildings,” Oddo said in a statement. “We got lucky that no one was killed in this collapse; we will not take that risk again.”
He said the agency was reviewing 368 other facade reports filed by the engineer in the most recent five-year inspection cycle.
The engineer, Richard Koenigsberg, said he did not know about the penalty until Gothamist contacted him while he was driving to the building site at 1915 Billingsley Terrace on Friday afternoon.
“They haven’t notified me yet,” he said, declining to comment further.
In a brief interview on Thursday, Eric Castillo, the owner of a bodega on the building’s ground floor, said the workers were hammering into the bricks just before the collapse.
“They were removing the bricks,” Castillo said in Spanish. “We were scared, but we didn’t know it was going to collapse.”
Andre Soto, a superintendent at a nearby apartment complex, said he was also stunned to see workers hammering into the corner of the building, where a crack had been growing for years.
“You can’t do that, that’s the corner,” he said, adding that neighbors had long worried about the growing…
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