Downtown Building’s Demolition Goes Dangerously Awry
Source with video
Downtown Building's Demolition Goes Dangerously Awry
Saturday November 24, 2007
CityNews.ca Staff
It was a supposed to be a safe and routine demolition, but an attempt to topple a building at King and Princess Sts. Friday morning instead sent dozens of bricks slamming down into two lanes of traffic and a sidewalk below.
"Somebody could have been underneath there," exclaimed Mitchell Tremblay, who witnessed the nearly-disastrous incident and captured it on his cell phone. "It could have been me under that."
The four-storey storage building came tumbling down just seconds after a car passed by.
"The bricks, unfortunately, fell the wrong way and they went out onto the street instead of away from the street," said Toronto Police Staff Sgt. Stan Belza. "Nobody was injured."
CityNews tried to contact the responsible construction company, but we were unable to get an immediate response, unlike people in the neighbourhood, who had plenty to say about the scary turn of events when our Omar Sachedina showed them Tremblay's shocking video.
They're sentiments he seconds, alleging he was also hit by a piece of falling glass in the same spot a week earlier.
"One of the bricks actually came right up to the curb while I was filming," Tremblay insists. "Whoever was in that black car came so close to having a brick come through."
A 12-story residential unit is going to be built on the site at King and Princess. As for what went wrong at the demolition, the Ontario Ministry of Labour is now investigating.
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I'm not sure which development this is for. And maybe this is the wrong forum for this. But the lot is in development, so it made sense to post here. Just no clue which building it's for.