Parking Garage Crumbles In Pa.

Part of a two-story parking garage near Penn State's main campus collapsed Tuesday, causing about 16 vehicles to fall through to the floor below. So far there are no reports of deaths or injuries, but emergency workers are searching the rubble as they clear the area.

A section that held 28 parking spaces crumbled at about 6 p.m. The garage was near an apartment building about eight blocks from campus.

Scott Gibson, the manager of the adjacent apartment complex - the Pepper Mill Condominiums - was able to help authorities account for and contact the people who work at the building and park in the garage.

While those individuals were all safely elsewhere at the time of the collapse, authorities note that doesn't completely rule out the possibility that someone else might be in the garage.

The second floor blacktop - and the 16 vehicles - covered several cars on the first floor. Search dogs sent into the rubble gave no signs that anyone was inside, but the dogs could not access the entire area, and fuel odors could disrupt their sense of smell, officials said.

Crews are working to remove the vehicles from the collapsed second-story blacktop and then shore up the rubble, a process they expected to take eight to 12 hours. Workers then plan to search underneath the blacktop for possible victims.

"These are good crane operators, good riggers, but this is slow work," said Tim Sevison, deputy chief of the Harrisburg Fire Department.

Jake Brandspigel, 21, a Penn State student from Elizabeth City, N.C., was leaving a nearby apartment building after delivering pizzas when the garage crumbled. He was about ten feet away.

"I walked out the door and right then the parking garage fell down. There were no explosions or anything funny. It just fell," Brandspigel said.

He and others called out to any victims who might be in the rubble, but got no response.

Many people who park on the first floor had left earlier, which gave officials reason to hope no one was trapped.

"As far as we know, a lot of the people who would park on that lower level work at the Pepper Mill (Condominiums), and they would have left before the collapse,"said Lt. Diane Conrad of the State College Police Department.

Genevieve Duque, a 30-year-old Penn State student from Chicago, was eating dinner in her apartment when she felt the building shake.

"I expected a car crash, not a whole part of a building falling in," said Duque, whose Toyota Camry is in the pile, resting against a Ford Escort.

Residents of the apartment building, who are mostly graduate students at Penn State, grabbed cameras to document the drama from their balconies.

Jennifer Kennedy, 22, said her Toyota Corolla parked on the first floor was at the bottom of the pile.

Gibson, the apartment manager, said his car is also among those on the ground level.

Police say the west wall of the garage seems to have been the first to cave in.

Firefighters are using welding tools to try to clear the huge pile of debris - which includes an approximately 70-foot-long piece of metal that might have been a guard rail. The pile is filled with bricks and cinderblocks. Glass globe lights that once lit the parking lot were scattered like abandoned balls at a playground.

Rescue workers were also working to right a Jeep and a second vehicle left dangling, half-on and half-off the stable section of the top floor.