Surveillance video offers new insight into 2023 building collapse in the Bronx
NEW YORK — Exclusive surveillance video gives new insight into a partial building collapse in the Bronx that happened last December.
The city is now taking action against the contractor.
Video shows customers escaping NYC deli minutes before collapse
Exclusive new surveillance video starts with a construction worker working on the facade of a Bronx building in December 2023 when suddenly the building buckles.
Surveillance video from a deli inside the building shows customers looking up, apparently feeling or hearing it too, and everyone gets out of the store just in time.
Three minutes later, the corner of the six-story building collapses, causing the ceiling and walls of the deli to crumble.
Incredibly, no one was killed.
New surveillance videos are key to collapse investigation
This week, the New York City Department of Buildings concluded its investigation into what went wrong, determining the engineer wrongly labeled a crucial load-bearing pier as purely decorative and the contractor failed to recognize the mistake before drilling into the pier the day of the collapse.
"There's a bang that people hear as a result of the contractor wrongly taking out bricks based on drawings by the engineer that misunderstood what that column meant," DOB Commissioner Jimmy Oddo said Monday. "That's how quickly after taking these bricks out that all hell broke loose."
The videos are key to the investigation because not only do they show how fast the building collapsed, but the DOB says it also shows the crews were actually there. Initially, the crews told investigators they weren't even working on the building the day of the collapse.