MILWAUKEE – A parking structure partially collapsed at a suburban Milwaukee shopping mall on Thursday afternoon, damaging two cars but leading to no apparent injuries.
“We’re fairly confident there is no one in that space,” North Shore Fire Department Chief Robert Whitaker told reporters, as authorities were able to view security video and spoke with owners of the two damaged vehicles.
“I mean we certainly, certainly dodged a bullet on this one,” said Bryan Kennedy, mayor of Glendale, where the mall is located.
It was 12:15 p.m. local time when fire department personnel were dispatched to the garage, Whitaker said.
Unclear was whether heavy snow overnight contributed to the collapse but Whitaker said he expected that weather played some role.
Overhead shots of the garage showed that the the snow on the parking garage’s third floor had been compressed into one central area, the site of the collapse.
The exit to the garage was completely blocked. The fire chief indicated that cars may be trapped in the garage for a month or more.
Whitaker said the collapse occurred “on the ramp down to get out and literally from the third floor down it is a wide open hole.”
“The third floor is in the first floor right now,” he said.
The collapse stunned those in the mall.
“It sounded like a bomb,” said Darius Fox, an employee of Rocky Rococo pizza, in an adjacent building. “It shook the whole building.”
Fox thought the sound was a bad car crash before he walked out with his coworkers to see the collapsed roof and pile of snow.
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The wintery mix of snow, sleet and ice that fell across Milwaukee County on Wednesday was extremely dense.
The county saw a “total liquid equivalent” between 0.9 and 1.2 inches from the storm, said Denny VanCleve, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sullivan.
One liquid equivalent typically equates to 10 inches of snow — or two to three inches of sleet, he said.
So even though the amount of snow and sleet covering the ground Thursday morning looked small, it packed a weighty punch.
“It can be deceiving,” VanCleve said. “It doesn’t seem like much but the piles are going to weigh much more than two inches of snow would.”
