One moment, they were sipping beer and cocktails on a Lincoln Park porch on a summer night–dozens of people in their 20s shining with promise. The next moment, the floor was falling away, plunging them toward the ground in a rush of bodies and splintered lumber.
“It felt like an avalanche,” said Tommy O’Connell, 23, one of the people at the party.
As the three-story porch pancaked early Sunday, it crushed people on the lower levels and tossed others into a heap. Twelve people were killed–10 of them asphyxiated beneath the mass of wood and people–and another 57 were injured in the porch collapse at a party attended largely by former New Trier High School students and University of Chicago Law School students.
City building officials spent Sunday picking through rubble to find a cause for the collapse and digging through city records to assess the owner’s compliance with building codes.
Although the building’s owners obtained permits for substantial rehab work five years ago, officials were unable to find permits for the porch itself. Obtaining permits triggers inspections of a structure’s plans and construction.
“We find no record of this permit at this time,” said Norma Reyes, the city’s building commissioner.
The party was hosted, in part, to welcome new tenants to the three-story building at 713 W. Wrightwood Ave., some guests said.
One of the party’s hosts, Ben Bradford, was a 1996 New Trier graduate and a U. of C. law student. Bradford survived, but his fiance, Julie Sorkin, 25, of Glenview, did not.
Claire Sufrin, another 1996 New Trier graduate, said many people at the party had known each other all their lives.
“It was definitely a New Trier crowd. It was a large, tight group of guys and girls–friends since they were kids in grammar school,” she said.
She and others said the party never became rowdy.
“It was really calm, people were drinking but nobody was really drunk,” Sufrin said. “There were only a handful of people smoking cigarettes. It was shocking how grown-up a party it was.”
Sufrin, who left the party shortly before the porch fell, said the porch seemed strong.
“It felt sturdy, it felt like the porch had a sense of permanency,” she said.
Party guests said the upper two levels of the porch were very crowded, with 35 to 40 people on each floor.
A former tenant of the second-floor apartment, Eric Clarke, had just arrived at the party and was inside when the porch collapsed. He said that in the two years he lived in the building, he had seen crowds of similar size on the porches.
“I wouldn’t say I was alarmed,” he said. “It had had capacities like that before.”
But Clarke said many people were leaving the party because the beer had run out, and so in addition to the large crowds on the porch levels, the stairs were loaded with people leaving.
Natalie Brougham was on the top level of the porch when it failed.
“It just collapsed, that’s all,” she said as she left the Belmont Area police headquarters after being interviewed. She walked with a limp and had cuts and bruises.
“There were no warning signs at all.”
She found herself with “people on top of me,” surrounded by boards and nails. Eventually, people pulled her out.
Witnesses described a horrific scene, with bloody survivors clambering from the wreckage and then trying to free friends trapped beneath the splintered timbers.
Horrified neighbors on nearby decks witnessed the collapse.
Elizabeth Guidici, 26, was with her roommates on a rooftop deck next door when they saw a board fall just before the collapse.
“Within minutes, from the top it kind of buckled down through the middle,” Guidici said.
“I could see arms up in the air, and I could just hear screaming. We came out and it was just chaos.”
As the porch went down, some people managed to scramble to the neighboring roof, she said. One man held onto a crossbeam, dangling two stories in the air, until firefighters rescued him, Guidici and firefighters said.
Those who jumped onto Guidici’s roof ran down the stairs to start pulling away the debris, trying to save friends.
“They started digging people out, and it was just a nightmare scene. I saw people pulling people out, motionless,” she said. “You saw people on their cell phones and you realize they were probably looking for their friends.”
Many neighbors who were home in bed heard the thunderous crash of the porch and rushed outside to help.
Rick Frommeyer had just finished walking his dog, when he heard the crash and ran out to join dozens of people already helping.
After seeing many people on the ground with leg and ankle injuries, he ran to a corner bar and asked for linens and ice to make ice packs.
“Some people were staggering around. People were crying. Some were in different stages of shock,” said Frommeyer, 37. “Others had friends who found them and were being comforted by them. Others didn’t know where they were.”
The Cook County medical examiner’s office determined that 10 of the victims died from “compressional asphyxia,” meaning their chests were crushed by heavy weight.
One victim, Katherine Sheriff, 23, of Pennsylvania died of multiple injuries, according to the medical examiner. Eric Kumpf, 30, of Hoboken, N.J., died of a broken neck.
Many of the dead came from the north suburbs, including Eileen Lupton, 22, of Lake Forest; Shea Fitzgerald, 19, of Winnetka; and Sam Farmer, 21, of Winnetka.
Others came from elsewhere in the area, including Kelly McKinnell, 26, of Barrington; Robert Koranda, 23, of Chicago; and Muhammed Hameeduddin, 24, of Chicago.
Others came from out of state, including John Jackson, 22, of Kansas City, Mo.; Henry Wischerath, 24, of Buffalo, N.Y.; and Margaret Haynie, 25, of Evansville, Ind.
City officials were investigating whether the porch, a 12-foot-wide, three-story-high wooden structure built on the back of the building, was built properly and with permits.
The building’s owner, Phillip Pappas, who owns several rental buildings in the city, was in Canada and not immediately reachable, city officials said.
Reyes said a preliminary inspection found that the porch was structurally sound.
Nevertheless, porches are not designed to support large crowds, no matter how well they are built.
“It may have been well-built,” said one city official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“But the problem is it invited a lot of people. It appeared to be 12 feet wide, with an extension beyond 12 feet for a barbecue area.”
Reyes stressed that such porches are built for access to buildings and not to accommodate large groups of people in the way a typical backyard deck would.
Every year the city Building Department makes a public service announcement reminding people not to put grills on the decks and not to crowd porches with people. The city does not have the resources to do annual inspections on the porches, officials said.
Chicago police were investigating the collapse and had interviewed nearly 50 people who were at the party, trying to put together a step-by-step account of what happened. Many of the interviews were conducted at hospitals, police spokesman David Bayless said.
Because the building had a commercial use, with a dry cleaning business on the ground level, it was subject to annual inspections, Reyes said. The last inspection was completed in November, with two minor violations unrelated to the porch, she said.
Reyes said she believed the porch was built in 1998, when a major renovation of the building was completed. After searching through records Sunday, city officials found no evidence that the porch was built with the proper permit, Reyes said.
The owner took out permits for installation of new heating and air-conditioning systems and for condensing the units from five apartments to three, Reyes said.
“It’s clear that they had permits. What’s not clear is if they exceeded the scope of their permits for the porch system,” Reyes said.
City officials had contacted the owner and the architect to find permit.
“If they cannot prove they had a permit, then there will be an issue,” Reyes said.
– – –
Porch party mishaps
Since 1995, there have been at least six other porch collapses during parties in the Chicago area and nearby suburbs.
PORCH INCIDENTS
May 1995: Eight people are injured when a third-floor porch on a Lincoln Park building collapses and falls one story.
Aug. 1995: eight partygoers are injured in Mt. Prospect when the wood supports of a back porch of an apartment collapses.
Sept. 1996: A North Side porch collapses, inuring 15.
Aug. 1997: A second-floor rear porch collapses during a party in Wicker Park, injuring 18 people.
June 1998: then partygoers are injured when a third-floor porch collpawses during a Bulls party in Wrigleyville.
Sept. 1999: A porch at a teacher’s home in unincorporated Fox river Grove collapses with 27 high school students on it.
Source: Tribune archives.
baiduhai.