Ten cars crushed, no injuries in carport collapse
Tony Mauro, left, a local contractor, inspects damage caused by a collapsed carport at the Park Place Apartments Monday morning while insurance adjustor Rial Gunlikson takes notes. Mauro had been contacted by the building's owner, Bill Hileman, to rebuild the collapsed carport. Ten vehicles were damaged when the wood carport collapsed shortly before noon on Sunday. (Karen Nichols photo/Daily Inter Lake)
By NICHOLAS LEDDEN/The Daily Inter Lake
Ten cars were crushed Sunday when a snow-weighted carport outside a Whitefish apartment complex collapsed.
No one was injured.
Thomas Popp, who lives in the Park Avenue apartment complex, was inside his 1984 Toyota pickup truck when the carport's roof caved inwards from both ends at about 11:20 a.m. Sunday.
"The cab is gone," Popp said of his truck as he recalled how his face and hands were sprayed with glass from the exploding windows. "Just, you know, survival mode kicked in."
A neighbor had come by saying it looked like the carport might collapse, Popp said. He ran outside and tried to move his truck - which he was in the process of restoring - but the vehicle wouldn't start. Then the structure toppled.
"This was my baby. This was my treasure," said Popp, who managed to army-crawl out the passenger side door.
Built with wooden beams and a corrugated metal roof, the structure may have been holding 70,000 to 80,000 pounds of wet snow made heavier by recent rain and warm weather, said Tony Mauro, a contractor with A1 Construction, and Robert Alm, who owns the Clean Cut excavating company.
Mauro and Alm said they were hired by the apartment complex's owner, attorney Bill Hileman, to assess the cleanup effort.
In one 10-foot by 10-foot section of the roof, Mauro estimated the snow was four feet deep and easily weighed 2,000 pounds.
In addition to the mass of snow, rotting wooden posts and the absence of cross bracing may have hastened the carport's collapse, Alm said.
Crews with metal-cutting tools hope to begin removing the carport in sections today. The process could take up to three days and result in additional damage to some of the smashed vehicles.
Mauro and Alm said they couldn't give a monetary estimate of the damage because as of Monday afternoon the insurance adjuster had yet to complete a report.
David Erickson returned to his apartment Sunday night to find carport rubble in his parking space.
Erickson, who had been away skiing, thought he was having a bad day until coming home to discover the fate he and his car had escaped.
"That's the first thing I thought: It's a good day to be out of town," Erickson said.
When the carport came down on Isaac Hall's Subaru Forester, it trapped all his books inside, making it very hard to study for his classes at Flathead Valley Community College, he said.
"I was inside and heard a big crash," Hall said. "All of the sudden it got light in the apartment."
Hall's car was pushed sideways four or five feet by a falling beam.
"There's not much to do but laugh," he said, acknowledging the futility of getting angry about the situation.
Reporter Nicholas Ledden can be reached at 758-4441 or by e-mail at nledden@dailyinterlake.com