Berkeley: Spotlight on safety of apartment complex

In the aftermath of the balcony collapse in which six Irish students died on Tuesday, attention in Berkeley has now turned to the construction of the Library Gardens apartment complex at the centre of the tragedy.

Questions will be asked as to how secure the balcony structure was prior to the accident, whether it complied with building codes and if the necessary maintenance and precautions were taken to make the balcony as secure as possible.

Engineering crews have inspected jagged broken beams of wood sticking from the building, marking where the balcony had snapped off. Pieces of wood came away, falling to the ground as the engineers touched them. City inspectors barred use of the other balconies during the investigation.

In a piece for a Berkeley publication, Carrie Olsen who sat on the Berkeley Design Review Committee for 14 years, said warnings about developments in Berkeley have gone ignored for years.

READ MORE: New York Times apologises for Berkeley article .

“For years, many of us have been raising flags about the buildings going up in Berkeley — their design, their mass, their proximity to little houses, their height, their construction, their noise, their unaffordability and their use. And we are scoffed at and trivialised.

“And that is okay, we have developed thick skins. But there is truth in what we say. It is time to slow this down, and take a look at all large multi-unit buildings constructed in the past 15 years of the building boom, and examine them for possible safety concerns,” Ms Olsen wrote for the Berkeley Daily Planet news website.

“Luckily, there is a City of Berkeley Plan Check process, and for a project this large, we can assume that would have been very thorough. But there will be an investigation. We will know for sure,” she said.

Speaking to reporters, Ms Olsen said the balcony would have been more for decoration than a sturdy platform to entertain large groups of friends: “It was definitely not large enough to be what the city would call an ‘open space balcony,’ where groups of people could stand outside. This was meant just to be a place where someone could stand out for bit, get a breath of fresh air. Not for something like 13 people.”

However, a spokesperson for the city of Berkeley said that there is no legal requirement for landlords to put up signs displaying maximum capacity of balconies.

He said that the Library Gardens complex would have been subject to a 1998 building code at the time of the building’s construction. This would dictate that the building’s balconies should be able to bear a load of 60lb per square foot.

Joshua Kardon, a structural engineer in Berkeley, said while balconies have collapsed in the past, the accident on Kittredge Street was “very disturbing” because it occurred in a newer building.

The investigation, he said, will likely look not only at the condition of the wood framing and its “failure mechanism”, but at how the balcony was designed and built — particularly how water would be kept from rotting the wood — and what was found during inspections.

Library Gardens was developed by Transaction Companies, a local group headed by John DeClercq, a prominent East Bay businessman who previously headed the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce.

DeClercq’s group, which spent more than five years winning approvals for the project, sold it in 2007 for $75m (€66.5m) to a real estate investment fund controlled by New Jersey-based BlackRock, which manages billions of dollars for pension funds and other groups.

In a statement, BlackRock said: “The loss of young life is truly heartbreaking, and our sincerest condolences go out to all the families and communities affected by today’s terrible accident.”

Library Gardens has been run by property management company Greystar since June last year since it acquired Riverstone Residential Group, the building’s prior property manager.

“Our hearts go out to the families and friends of the deceased and those injured in this tragic accident,” a company statement read.

“We have taken precautionary steps to limit access to other balconies at the apartment complex... and we will be working with an independent structural engineer and local authorities to determine the cause of the accident.”

READ MORE: New York Times apologises for Berkeley article .