New York: Crews pulled a body from the rubble of a New York City parking garage Wednesday, as building inspectors sought to pinpoint a cause for the century-old structure’s deadly collapse.
It was a delicate operation to recover the victim and remove as many as 90 vehicles scattered on the structure’s buckled top deck and amid tons of shattered concrete. Crews used cranes to pluck cars from the ruins one by one but made only modest progress.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has opened an investigation into the collapse, a spokesperson said. A preliminary investigation found that all three floors of the garage partially or completely collapsed, according to the city’s Buildings Department. The garage’s rear wall partially collapsed, and the front facade bulged.
“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 building crumbled just as a stream of customers were returning from work to retrieve their cars.
The identity of the victim was not immediately released, and it was not immediately known if it was that of a missing garage worker.
