‘It’s one of those acts of God’
Cleanup commences on tons of collapsed scaffolding
The clunking and humming of heavy machinery echoed through downtown Friday as crews began removing tons of steel rods that rained onto East Martin Street the night before, blanketing parked cars and piercing a church building and roof in its path.
During a storm that swept through the region Thursday night, wind gusts up to 60 mph peeled 230 feet of steel scaffolding from the side of a 14-story office building owned by AT&T. The scaffolding was scheduled to be removed Monday.
The collapse caused no major injuries, although a husband, wife and small child sitting at a nearby bus bench suffered minor cuts and bruises when they tripped and fell while running out of the way of the twisting mass of metal.
A parish building next to the historic St. Mark’s Episcopal Church took the brunt of the blow. At least four cars also were damaged.
“It’s one of those acts of God,” said Urs Senser, a sales representative for Big City Access, the company that provided the scaffolding.
The company is investigating why the structure ripped from the building. It was unclear how the scaffolding was attached to the brick exterior.
The crumpled pile of metal towered over streetlights, traffic signals and onlookers who stopped Friday to take photographs. It appeared to twist from its base on the AT&T building, falling across the street and landing atop the four-story church hall.
In a section of the street blocked
by caution tape, workers wearing bright-yellow vests and hard hats spent Friday melting apart the rods with blowtorches, removing the metal piece by piece.
Some workers spent their breaks in the near 100-degree heat leaning against the trunk of a light-blue Ford sedan. Its roof had caved in under the weight of the debris. Rods shattered the windshield and front seat windows, strewing glass across the asphalt.
The steel skeleton had been anchored to the building since January for restoration work on the facade. AT&T still owns the building, though the telecommunications giant moved its headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas in 2008. The Bexar Appraisal District valued the building at $13.7 million earlier this year — AT&T’s most valuable San Antonio holding.
“We are working with authorities and the contractor to investigate,” AT&T said in a statement.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets federal standards for the use of scaffolding. According to OSHA, issues with scaffolding are among the agency’s most frequent causes for citations in the construction industry.
In the early 2000s, the federal agency recorded an estimated 4,500 injuries and 50 fatalities caused by scaffolding accidents each year. More recent data wasn’t available Friday afternoon, and an OSHA representative didn’t return requests for comment.
Earlier this year, scaffolding collapsed from the Worthington Renaissance Hotel in downtown Fort Worth, leaving a worker dangling from the side of the building by his hands and critically injuring a woman hit by falling debris.
A similar incident occurred in Houston in 2015, when scaffolding tumbled from a luxury apartment building and covered six workers in rubble, sending them to the hospital.
Texas doesn’t require contractors to obtain permits to erect scaffolding — and neither does the city of San Antonio, Assistant City Manager Roderick Sanchez said in a Friday memo to Mayor Ron Nirenberg, City Council members and city executives.
Other U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago and Baltimore require permits to place scaffolding on the side of buildings.
Councilman Roberto Treviño, whose district includes downtown, said addressing safety concerns about scaffolding could become a more urgent need as downtown sees more development.
The city could look into adopting its own rules that supplement OSHA requirements but don’t exceed them, he said. It will depend on whether the federal agency investigates the incident and what it finds.
“We’re likely to see something like this again,” Treviño said. “If there’s something we can do to prevent this or be more proactive, we should certainly have that conversation.”
In downtown, first responders, bystanders and members of the crushed church repeated the same sentiment: It was a blessing that no one was seriously hurt.
Mary Jane Verette, president of the San Antonio Parks Foundation, was in a nearby building when she heard the crash. She went outside and saw the family members who were injured running away from the falling rods. The mother was bleeding and an officer was comforting the child.
“It was a very emotional scene. The baby was scared, and the officer was just hugging him tight,” Verette said. “I was just talking with some people about how we as a community need to make sure we are taking care of each other and supporting each other, and this was just the perfect example of this.”
Some people in the area at the time said it sounded like a plane crash. The scaffolding penetrated the church building across the street, crushing the air-conditioning unit and ripping open the roof. Rain began to pour in.
“What many of our parishioners and our community will want to know is our historic church that's 161 years old is fine,” the Rev. Beth Knowlton of St. Mark’s told a crowd of reporters Friday afternoon.
The state of the nearby parish house, however, remains to be seen, she said. Although the building appears to be structurally sound, the church is working with its insurance company to understand the extent of the roof and water damage. The church also is looking for a temporary air conditioning fix.
“This is just a wonderful reminder that churches are about the community, not about buildings,” said Knowlton.
The reverend said they’re all praying to have church on Sunday.