ANTIGO — The lower portion of an aging 5th Ave. building spontaneously collapsed Monday morning, leading city officials to close down Superior St. and eventually contact a crew to demolish part of the building to prevent a possible uncontrolled collapse.
Doug Vrechek, the urban search and rescue team manager for Wisconsin Task Force 1, the crew that was called to assist the Antigo Fire Department in partially demolishing the building, located at 701 5th Ave., said he believes the building is somewhat more stable than it was earlier in the day.
“There were thousands of pounds of brick that were unsupported,” Vrechek said. “It was the same type of construction that was in the Davenport, Iowa collapse a year ago. It was the same situation where that was all undermined and the weight wasn’t there. Brick isn’t like a concrete wall — brick just falls off the bottom because there’s nothing to hold it. Mortar won’t hold it. The weight of it is just going to cause it to drop. The uncontrolled drop of that may cause the whole building to drop at an unpredictable time. This way, we were able to predict when the weight goes down this way, so that’s why we chose to do it mechanically.”
Building Inspector and Zoning Administrator Beth McCarthy said the building, originally built in 1905, was bought by a Sheboygan man named Scott Weigert in the past year, but that he did not disclose how he planned to use it.
“He had been doing demolition as far as we were concerned, but nothing that warranted permits that we could tell. We have no idea the extent. We just know that things were being removed from the interior regularly because of the dumpsters being full,” McCarthy said.
Mayor Terry Brand, who along with McCarthy has prioritized enforcing building codes since taking office, said Weigert has been unresponsive to requests they have made to inspect his building and generally “elusive of the authority of the city.”
“There’s been a dumpster out here that’s been filled and emptied and filled and emptied,” Brand said of the work done on the building by Weigert, whose wife was notified of the wall’s partial collapse by the Sheboygan Police. “How much material did he take out and what was it that he took out? Was he trying to open up some rooms and took out a weight-bearing wall? We don’t know. But something is pressurizing that building down and out and it found a weak spot and popped it.”
Public Works Department Head Charley Brinkmeier said the building that partially collapsed Monday is one of a few downtown that has not been sufficiently kept up.
“When we re-did this parking lot, obviously when you pave, you have compacting rollers that have vibratories on them. They actually shut the vibratory off because of that wall. They didn’t want it to collapse on them,” Brinkmeier said. “We’ve told the prior owner and everything else and they just don’t do anything with it, so this is what happens. That’s what happens with all these old buildings if you don’t maintain them.”
Jenny Easker said she was outside her restaurant BB Jack’s at roughly 9:30 a.m. and saw the wall start to crumble.
“I was going out to get the mail and I just saw that the wall was caving in. I thought somebody took a sledgehammer and hit it from the inside, and I was like, ‘Wow, somebody’s taking the wall down,’ because I could see it collapsing. Then I realized that no one was doing that, that it was just coming down on its own. It just seemed like somebody hit the wall from the inside — it just collapsed outward. Then after I went back in, I came back out, and I could see that more of it was gone, so it was progressing on its own.”
Stanley Brown, the owner of the dentistry practice connected to the 701 5th Ave building, said no one in his office actually heard the wall fall, and so he didn’t know about it until an acquaintance of his knocked on his door and told him.
“We just walked over there and looked and sure enough, the wall was down. So I just had my patients and we all moved our cars,” Brown said around noon. “We’re closing right now. We’re in the process of getting out. We have to call patients and stuff like that. The fire chief said that they highly recommended it. So we’ll be out of here within a half hour or hour probably. He said we might actually have to close tomorrow too, so we might be closed for a little while until they figure out what’s going to happen, or if they tear it down.”
Throughout the morning and early afternoon Monday, city officials attempted to contact structural engineers to assess the integrity of the damaged building. While no signs of further deterioration to the building were apparent, officials did cordon off a widening buffer zone around it as a precaution against possible collapse.
“We’re hoping that doesn’t happen, but you’ve got to worry about those things and at least keep it in mind that that’s maybe a possibility and make decisions accordingly,” Antigo Police Chief Dan Duley said around noon. “Right now, it’s just a matter of getting some experts in here to give us a better determination of what’s potentially going on there, and we’ll make our decisions from there.”
Brand said accidents like this are the reason he and McCarthy have begun emphasizing complying to building codes.
“From right here, you can see one, two, three really old buildings that, if they’re not maintained properly, this will happen there also,” he said. “If you enforce the building code on a regular basis, it’s never a big deal, it’s never a huge expense to fix that little thing. But when you wait years and years, you end up with a big thing.”
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