NEW ORLEANS — The timetable to get the Hard Rock collapse site down and recover the bodies inside has been extended, city officials said Friday, as the start of a long demolition process could get underway by the beginning of next week.
A plan to take down the Hard Rock Hotel piece by piece, rather than implode the building and clean up the rubble, was almost ready to go Friday, New Orleans fire chief Tim McConnell said. If approved by the hotel's owners, the city will permit workers to start preparing for the demolition as early as Monday.
"The plan is to pick the building apart," McConnell said. " The more engineers looked at it, the more unstable they found it to be."
The unfinished hotel at the corner of Canal and Rampart streets partially collapsed Oct. 12, killing three people and injuring dozens more. The bodies of two workers, 63-year-old Jose Ponce Arreola and 36-year-old Quinnyon Wimberly, were trapped inside and could not be recovered safely ahead of the demolition.
The collapse forced an evacuation zone around the construction site, impacting businesses, traffic, tourism and more in the aftermath. Multiple lawsuits were quick to surround the incident as federal investigators continued to investigate the cause and city officials calculated the growing costs of clean up.
FULL COVERAGE: Hard Rock hotel collapse: Investigation, Rescue & Recovery
While the property owners, 1031 Canal Development LLC, said they were originally advised by hired engineers to implode the building, their plan changed to a demolition -- taking the building down without an explosion.
According to McConnell, the new approach changes the original timetable to get the building down. The entire structure will need to have shoring added to stabilize it before they can tear it down and recover the bodies of the two workers inside.
While McConnell said an exact timetable was not yet available, both he and Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the first priority was to recover the workers for their families, who have been unable to receive official death certificates from the coroner without them.
"It is painful. I can’t imagine any worse during the holidays, but, we need to ensure we don’t lose any more life or get anyone injured in the course of doing this,” McConnell said.
Once approved, the first step will be to build shorings to stabilize the site. Once safe, crews will take apart the areas on top of the bodies to open them up to be recovered before taking down the entire building.
Kolb Grading LLC and its affiliate Dem/Tech were hired by the building owners for the demolition. Dem/Tech has been cited for previous safety violations after bystanders were injured during their demolition of a building in 2013.
McConnell said the extended timeline for the demolition would be available next week. With the originally proposed implosion, officials believed the building would come down in mid-January, then take three months to clean up.
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